


wait a minute!

by meltingheart



Category: SHINee
Genre: 4 Walls-inspired, M/M, Minor Original Character(s), Minor Violence, Mystery, Psychological, Reality Bending, Time Loop, View-inspired
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-22
Updated: 2019-08-22
Packaged: 2020-07-24 19:15:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20019643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meltingheart/pseuds/meltingheart
Summary: SHINee have been locked in a perfect loop, where the days blend into each other and the boundaries between their very beings are blurred. one day, their fragile balance is fractured when Jinki gains sentience and falls out of their rhythm.





	wait a minute!

**Author's Note:**

> This is my fill for prompt 41 of the Summer of SHINee Fic Fest, which you can see above as the plot summary! This prompt immediately caught my eye when I saw it. I have gone a little off-prompt by coupling View in as well as adding a small bit of (plot-driven) romance, but I hope I've still done it justice. I really enjoyed writing it; though it was insanely difficult to write this while I was in the process of a trans-continental move, I loved working to create a world that's slightly outside of reality. Though I'm not entirely satisfied with my own execution, this fic threw me outside of my box while still allowing me to work with subjects I love, and I'm so happy for the experience. 
> 
> Thank you to every one of my friends whose enthusiasm about my drafts encouraged me while I was writing this fic! To my beta-reader Charlie and my fellow Summer of SHINee mods Tony and Aqua, I couldn't have made this what it is now without your input, and I really appreciate you.

The air is muggy, laden with the morning dew despite the sun having risen long ago: its burning honeyed rays poured over the world. Over his shoulders, hot like lava, it spills through the gaps in his fingers, reflects off the bleached concrete in a way that makes it hot, so hot. He can’t remember the last time it wasn’t hot. 

His sneakers are bleach white, like the ground he stands on. It’s confusing. Yesterday, weren’t they red? Red like the sleeves on the shirt that person wears as they sprint past, laughing like he can’t breathe. He can’t remember bringing more than one pair of shoes, but they’d escaped, anyways, with nothing more than the clothes on their backs, so he assumed not. 

They’re running still, a whole crowd of people in step, sky dip-dyed blue and pressing down on him like it could bleed into his skin, marking him the same color. It feels like it’s only luck that the others choose to duck into a convenience store, rescuing him from a fate of drowning in robin’s-egg blue paint. 

There’s a laugh in his ear, loud and sharp like the way the evergreen glass had looked when that beer bottle was shattered against Minho’s head last night, twinkling like the low light had off the edges of each scattered shard. Hold on, that had never happened before. Minho had never been in a bar fight, and he had never felt the sensation of blood dripping down the back of his neck after tiny glass fragments like bits of sand were smashed into it. 

Snack after snack piles into the cart, burying him in plastic balloons and canned fruit and Pepsi logos. All of it seems familiar, though the script of the Thai language escapes him he can’t help but taste the items in his mouth as they slide past him, propped up above the bottom of the cart by his own oversized body. The laugh keeps going and going, even after he shakes himself off, hoists himself up, and pushes the cart after the one who’s laughing. Maybe he’s the one who’s laughing. 

They don’t pay for the treats but no one seems to even mind. No one seemed to even be manning the shop. The aisles they left behind were as empty of color as the streets, the only company besides his ragtag group being a few sunbleached blue labels declaring best ingredients or tastiest flavor. Even those shelves used to be stocked with product, he thinks. Or maybe they had just been unusually barren today. It strikes him as unsettling, suddenly setting the whole world around him an inch off-center. 

Someone’s talking to him, multiple someones, voices intimately familiar and yet strange at the same time, like he’s hearing it from inside of someone else’s head. The only feeling their words give him is deja-vu. 

He’s been doing this a long time, he realizes, feeling the weight of each step he’s taken identically as the day before when his feet slam into the pavement, as if he’s been carving a path just for himself to follow, unknowingly locking himself into it. He pushes the cart away, after the one laughing, in an effort to get out of this. But still, what if the one laughing is also him. Could he escape then? 

The world spins out of control and splinters.

* * *

Jinki wakes up, without warning. He sucks in a breath like he’s been drowning, still expecting to be underwater and gasping with surprise when he comes up with air. The air is hot despite the pre-dawn breeze, despite the low hum of the cheap, white standing fan brushing it over his face again and again. He doesn’t sit up, doesn’t move, doesn’t want to look around at the room. 

When he tries to remember last night, his brain feels empty - like someone took a scalpel and cut away everything after mid-afternoon, leaving only sharp edges that teeter into nothingness. It’s probably the same as every night for the last few months, the nights he doesn’t understand how he remembers, the ones filled with flashing lights and the smell of fruity drinks and sweaty bodies, but there’s no real hangover. So maybe not. 

He thinks he doesn’t know where he is. But beneath that, he _knows_ where he is. He’s in Thailand, and the muggy atmosphere will continue to hug him close all day, until he’s wishing he would suffocate on it. 

Unsettled, a frown cut deep into his face, he sits up. The room is tiny, even smaller than the ones he’d shared with his members before they hit it big, painted a dusty shade of off-white and stuffed to the brim with odds and ends, mismatched furniture with blue paint splattered all over it. It still feels empty, and for a moment, he knows it’s strange. Doesn’t she usually sleep over there on the floor? Doesn’t Taemin usually have one leg hooked over both of Jinki’s, driving him out of bed as soon as he realizes how much hotter it makes both of them? 

Realization begins to set in, cold drops trickling down his neck on an otherwise pleasant morning. Something’s different, today, and something hasn’t truly been different for longer than Jinki can remember. Jinki sits there, staring at his hands, hands which look younger than he feels all of a sudden, trying not to hyperventilate and failing desperately because _what is going on_. 

What had he read, long ago, in some throwaway book most others would skip over, the one that imprinted itself on him a little too much? To mentally take stock of everything around him if he was breaking down? Jinki breathes in and out a few more times, slow and controlled, like he sometimes had to when Kibum got too high-strung and needed someone else to help bring him down. 

He doesn’t know where anyone else was, or how long he’d been doing this. He also doesn’t seem to have any real memories of just being himself, because the longer he tries to figure out what he had done recently, the more perspectives on the same 24-hour period flooded in. Familiar faces and those that should have been unfamiliar fly in and out of his focus, from different points of view he knew weren’t his. Jinki even stumbles upon a memory of seeing himself, from another’s eyes, kissing her in an abandoned hallway. He wishes he knew why the view was glazed over in dull heartbreak and icy-hot regret. 

But memories like that one, countless hazy images that kaleidoscope behind his closed eyelids, aren’t going to get Jinki any closer to understanding the situation he’s in. And, now that he thinks of it, neither is taking stock of this tiny room, because there’s nothing more to see than what he has already.

He sighs, again, to hopefully expel the lost feeling weighing down on his lungs, and swings his legs from the thin mattress, standing up to leave the strangely cramped bedroom he’s found himself in, mysteriously, unfathomably. 

The rest of the house is just as cramped as his bedroom, random thrifted objects crowded every open space without any reason. The whiteness of the walls, brightly reflecting the sunlight streaming in from every small, dust-covered window is the only thing keeping Jinki from feeling like he’s in an abandoned cave, lost, alone as he was from the moment he woke up. 

Jinki turns left at the end of the hallway he carefully picked his way across, expecting to see exactly what he does see: the kitchen table, with two seats haphazardly placed around its small surface. Both seats are empty, and there are multiple glasses overturned on the table, condensation collecting where their rims meet its surface. It’s odd. He would’ve sworn, before turning the corner, that he would see that person sitting here, that person whose name slips through his fingers like a stream of water. 

“Jinki!” The call breaks through his confused fugue, shatters the solid expectations beneath it of what is supposed to happen. Jinki whirls around, eyes wide, and Minho’s standing just outside, head poking through the kitchen’s low window to smile at him. “What are you doing? You’ve been right there for ten minutes now, just staring at the table. We’ve been waiting for you! Come out here!” 

That’s new, too, that’s unfamiliar. Jinki hasn’t even gotten his head around how something he’s never experienced before could give him the sensation of losing an assured safety net or running off a path he’s stayed on for years, but there’s really no time to ponder on it any further. There’s a day to experience, again as if for the first time. 

The air outside where Minho waits with two others is a little easier to breathe than the air inside the ramshackle building, the sky the same blue that Jinki feels it has been forever. “Good morning,” he greets, a little out-of-place. The two not-really-strangers smile at him anyways, going back to their hurried conversation in Thai pretty quickly. Why was Jinki forced out here before he was done investigating the house, again? 

Minho’s smile returns as he turns to him and says, “the members went off somewhere. We don’t know when they’ll be back so we were thinking about like, finding a pool to swim in or something. It’s so hot here, isn’t it, hyung?” 

Actually, Jinki’s been feeling pretty cold for a while now, despite the full warmth of the morning sun pressing on his back again. 

He mumbles a response to Minho, something like an ‘I guess.’ Minho smiles, because Jinki hasn’t done anything that he finds out of the ordinary, even though to Jinki, everything since the moment he woke up has been that way. 

“Hey, you two,” Minho calls to the strangers, breaking them out of their own conversation. “Jinki still needs an introduction, he only met Jao-chou yesterday.”

“That’s weird!” The girl titters, cropped bob fluttering in the breeze. “But okay. I’m Pancake, this guy is Taeng-mo. He won’t tell you this but he loves being called Momo, okay?” 

All the names mentioned slide into place in the puzzle he’s building in his mind of what is, for now, his entire world. Jinki feels like he knew their names even before they said them, and there’s already feelings associated with them as well, but it’s not like he can go sort them out in detail right now. The others have decided it’s time to get going, and Minho follows them, a hand around Jinki’s wrist to drag him along. 

More memories suggest themselves back into his mind as they begin their trek towards what Jinki assumes is the location of the pool. He can’t yet remember a time where he went to the pool in the morning, or with Minho and the two people who lead the way in front of them with slightly hunched shoulders and sure steps. But there are other familiar things; the line of tired, burned-down candles in front of the too-small temples by the edge of the courtyard, the way the strangers laugh and cajole them when Minho feels it’s too hot to continue on, the pattern of the rooftops and the trees crowding every empty space between them. 

Maybe, just maybe, Jinki just has some previously undocumented kind of amnesia, and this is nothing at all. It would certainly explain why even though every day before this has, apparently, been the same, today is decidedly different. He continues through the morning more cheerfully then, enjoying the new and fresh conversations Minho prods him through, despite the niggling bit of doubt in the back of his head that anything has changed at all beyond this one scene. 

The reassurance he’s tricked himself into thinking ends with a sudden splash when Taemin runs through the iron gates and cannonballs himself into the pool, an hour or so after they’d reached it. The resulting tidal wave laps up to Jinki’s knees where he’s put his feet into the water, and douses him from the head down. 

And from there, the day melds into the unchanging sameness that he remembers; Taemin laughs the same way he always has, and Jonghyun pushes Jinki into the water with his hands solid and hard on Jinki’s back. Despite the absolute lack of surprise any of it brings, Jinki still finds himself shocked, from the physical sensation of the lukewarm water and from the feeling of self-betrayal he’s fallen into. 

The irregularity of that day quickly melts into its own routineness as it starts to guide Jinki through it over and over again, weaving him into a brand new tapestry of events. Horror grows in his bones, seeing the eeriely familiar expressions and conversations play out before him no matter how many mornings arrive. It’s frustrating, too, watching and observing the same day so many times, desperate to pick out what exactly is just slightly different from what he remembers. 

Every morning, Jinki wakes up with a sense of emptiness, and unlike the first time, seeing his friends waiting outside doesn’t fill it. He begins to ignore their invitations. Instead Jinki explores the house, studies the weeds growing in the cracks of the sun-bleached sidewalks outside, takes note of every person’s typical whereabouts relative to himself, memorizes the routine paths of every conversation he overhears - even that doesn’t help. 

According to his own mental calendar, it’s been about two weeks, and Jinki can’t help but wonder. What is the point of all this? Is there something he’s supposed to do, after seeing all this?

The day usually blurs into ambiguous shapes and colors by sunfall, when every member of their ragtag group piles into an abandoned warehouse, bottles of alcohol and mixers clinking together in their loosely circled arms. By that time of day, the heat is oppressive, settling deep into his skin, and the warmth of old beer doesn’t do much to help chase it away. He typically drinks anyways - he remembers that much. 

Not tonight, though. Tonight he’s going to do something _different_. 

It’s been whittling away at him for a few days now, the desire to understand what goes on at night that he can never seem to remember when he wakes up, clock dialed back hours earlier. Sleeping in later triggered an entirely different morning for him, so many days (weeks?) ago when he finally gained awareness. Who’s to say that he can’t cause something new by acting differently again, tonight? 

When Taemin, Jao-chou, Jonghyun and Taeng-mo storm into the warehouse that night, disturbing the peaceful quiet the rest had been in with their loud, triumphant shouts, Jinki doesn’t get up and take a beer. They do look tempting from where they’re lined up and displayed on the dusty bar counter, sunset filtering in and glinting off the sapphire-like glass. But he can’t go on longer, not knowing, not able to change.

He has to stay focused on the scene before him, he has to not get lost in the routine and the heat and the rhythmic chirps of cicadas announcing the evening, a sound suddenly covered up by static and distant conversation. 

Someone has found a radio behind a stack of sagging boxes and old vending machines, and though it takes a while to tune and the sound is scratchy, it works, filling the space with strange, crooning EDM ballads. The others work their way around the alcohol and each other, filtering off in trios or duos to dance and drink. The energy of the moment and rising crescendo of laughter and voices turns the warehouse from an abandoned, gaping empty space into one that seems more full of people than it actually is. 

The noise keeps Jinki from focusing too hard, loosens him up enough for him to snort and help Jonghyun right himself after he trips over Kibum, slouching over and leaning into Jinki’s torso. He ends up sloshing Jinki’s feet with beer from his third bottle.

“You’re such a lightweight!” Pancake quips at Jonghyun from across the room, laughing loud, barely audible as her voice weaves into the noise of the room. Even as she says it, her hands are firm around Minho’s wrists, pulling him through the darkened doorway leading out of the main space, off to God-knows-where. 

Jonghyun’s laughing too, trying to follow after them. He whines when Jinki pulls him back, as if Jinki’s personally offended him by preventing him from going with. Jinki didn’t do it on purpose, but rather, by the sudden tug of a memory - Jonghyun was usually out here, taking care of an unreasonably and unusually tipsy Jinki, at this time of the night. And Jinki doesn’t think that it would do good to have that be changed. Though he isn’t sure quite yet what _should_ be changed, a pull in his gut tells him it isn’t this.

It’s almost dark in the warehouse now, only lit by a couple flickering, exposed lightbulbs and the final few rays of sun kissing the walls goodbye. Jonghyun slips out of Jinki’s grip, ducking his way back into the main space. Jinki settles himself down to keep watching, keep waiting, feeling all the world like the blue jay that lived outside his window as a child, the one who waited for the right pattern of light and shade before he swooped down to strike, beak slicing through the wings of summer butterflies.

“Hyung! What should we do tomorrow?” Taemin nearly yells when he catches Jinki’s eye, moving boneless and liquid towards him. He’s radiating excitement, warm as the air around him, unusual as the feeling of warm beer making his toes damp. 

He drapes himself over Jinki’s lap, both of them somehow on the floor. Jinki doesn’t have the heart to tell him that there has not been and there will be no tomorrow. “It’s so cool that we’re here. I thought being kidnapped would suck a lot more than this.”

Now that Taemin brings it up, Jinki’s not sure that they had ever gotten a reason as to why they’d ever been kidnapped. He breathes in to ask where Jao-chou, the one he’s figured is leader of their kidnappers, is; they haven’t interacted at all during his looped days here. 

His thoughts stop and his mouth shuts abruptly when he notices the only thing worth noticing in the room: Minho and Pancake have come back, both ruffled. Minho’s eyes, strangely to Jinki, are dark and downcast, though the image seems correct as well. The room descends into more chaos, everyone crowding the two and drawing them back into the pulsing commotion in the center of the space. 

Everyone except Taeng-mo, that is. Jinki watches, eyes serious and wide, as the shorter man yanks the beer Pancake had grabbed for Minho right out of Minho’s hand. 

“Fuck you,” he starts off, jabbing Minho in the chest with the rounded base of the bottle. 

“Dude, what the hell?” Minho grins good-naturedly, stumbling back a couple steps and into Kibum’s back. The smile doesn’t reach his eyes. Kibum frowns and turns around, one arm draping naturally over Minho’s shoulders. 

“Is he bothering you?” Kibum asks. Minho laughs again and shakes his head, even though Taeng-mo’s face twists with more anger. 

“Yeah, he’s fucking _bothering_ me, all of you are!” Taeng-mo shouts, crowding into their space. 

“Taeng-mo, relax,” Pancake exclaims, reaching around behind him to try and grab the bottle. He dodges out of her hands, avoiding her, and Jinki blinks, almost unable to follow the scuffle of movement. 

Minho looks confused more than anything as Kibum and a couple others crowd around him. He says something that Jinki figures must be a question, but for a moment, Jinki feels like he’s been dunked underwater, unable to hear beyond the roaring of his ears. It quiets down just long enough for him to hear the ensuing retort from Taeng-mo, but he can’t tell if it’s luck - none of this seems to be. 

“Why did I even agree to help kidnap you stupid celebrities, huh? So you can snatch away the girl I’ve been in love with since I was six?” 

“It’s not like that, I- I would never, Momo!” Minho’s face betrays the shock and horror he feels at the idea, and Jinki wonders if something really happened back there. Taeng-mo’s eyes flash with frustration and anger when Minho tacks on the nickname, and it all tears apart at the seams from there. 

Taeng-mo’s hand tightens around the bottle’s neck. 

Jinki feels sick, he feels something tip over in the space, something changing the same way it has many times before. This is what’s going to happen, because it’s what’s happened before. And he must watch, he has no choice but to see what has evaded him for so long if he has any hope for tomorrow. 

The scene flows on too fast for him to react, though, as the roaring in his ears and the floatiness in his head gets worse. Starting from the telegraphed arc of Taeng-mo’s arm as he pulls it back, everything speeds along as if it’s going through a motion that Jinki can’t follow quick enough to totally understand. 

There is more shouting, and another struggle, and a silence as the rest of the crowd stops and turns to see what the fuss is about. 

There is the shattering of glass against a hard object, and Minho’s head careens forward as he cries out in shock. He’s doubled over, Kibum’s hands hovering over him. Blood drips onto the floor. 

* * *

Overgrown leafy plants brush against their arms as they push their way through the iron gate towards the abandoned pool, shading them from the searing heat of the mid-morning sun. It’s cooler here than usual, but Jinki isn’t in the mood to enjoy it - he feels antsy, anxious for the sun to set and the nightly party to begin. The image which had avoided him for weeks is burned into his head, and so are all the ways he can possibly prevent it from coming to pass. 

Though he had thought yesterday that keeping sober would be the catalyst to change, he is sure now: stopping Minho from getting assaulted is what he has to do. 

Minho, unaware of the events he’s experienced day after day for what must be an eternity, turns his head back to smile at Jinki and says, “Last one in pays for snacks later!” He pulls his shirt over his head, the white one that Jinki’s seen dyed red with his own blood, and tosses it away into the dirt that smudges it with the same rusty color. 

“Wait,” he calls to Minho, before he can think of a better way or time to breach the topic. Minho looks over his shoulder at him again, confusion creasing his crows-feet into a different shape than a smile gives them. “I have something to tell you,” Jinki continues, awkward. 

Minho walks back towards him easily, back across the few meters he’d managed to run to give himself a head-start in their race and back into the edge of the shadows. The shade of the leaves surrounding them dapples Minho’s bare skin in patterns, his back still shrouded in light. The idea of them having a race makes Jinki want to laugh or cry - there is no race longer than the marathon he’s on, the never-ending run towards a tomorrow that never changes. 

“What’s wrong, Jinki? This isn’t a sneaky idea for you to win our race, is it?” Minho asks when Jinki’s been silent a second too long, now close enough to him for Jinki to be able to whisper his next reply.

And he almost does, quiet as he replies, “Don’t listen to Pancake about Taeng-mo, okay? Don’t get too close to anyone or act too familiar.” 

Frowning, obviously not expecting that, Minho asks, “Why not? They obviously like us, they’re our fans. We should be friendly, hyung.” 

Jinki sighs, vision focusing past Minho and onto the pool area, where Taeng-mo and Pancake are already diving in and splashing. The smiles fit on their faces so naturally, as if they’d never experienced the anger and dismay of the night Jinki has. After all, they haven’t, yet. “I just need you to be careful. It’s safer for us if you are.” 

Minho sighs, shoulders drooping slightly. “Hyung, I don’t want them to just turn us in or abandon us so that we have no choice but to go home yet. I’m not ready to go. Is there something specific bothering you?” 

He almost wants to laugh - Minho’s not ready to go, but Jinki’s been ready to leave this same day for the last two weeks. Trying to keep composure, Jinki mumbles, “Listen, just don’t call Taeng-mo any nicknames or get too close to Pancake. They’re obviously in love or something, and I don’t want you to get hurt by getting in the middle.” 

He didn’t want to phrase it that way, though it’s true, but framing the issue as one of a love triangle instead of one regarding Minho’s safety ends up being the right way to go about it. The confusion leaks out of Minho, his shoulders straightening and his expression more knowing. 

Deeming the conversation has closed after he gives a deft nod, Minho starts, “So, about that race…” and Jinki smiles and sighs, deciding to indulge him. He yanks Minho’s arm back when the other tries to run ahead of him, and overtakes him by the halfway point to the pool. The water is refreshing and cold when he leaps in, and it’s bright, sunbeams refracting through every splash that rushes past him. 

Minho ducks Jinki’s head back under the water’s surface as soon as he catches up, crowing his laughter. The breath is shocked out of Jinki’s lungs, mouth opening and eyes still wide to witness the bubbles floating past him. 

What Jinki’s most thankful for is that Minho seems to have taken his advice to heart. Jinki steals glances at him every so often, despite Taemin and Jonghyun needing constant supervision to keep from getting into antics that surely would get them found by their agency or worse. Minho seems careful, laughing casually and politely when the two from the morning crew talk to him but not contributing much either way. Jinki notes the smug triumph in Taeng-mo’s expression whenever Pancake leans further towards him than her passing interest in Minho would have her do, and feels accomplished in what he’s done today. 

The night passes, half-forgotten by Jinki once again, though he makes his best efforts to not drink. Jonghyun’s laughing face is so warm and bright, he feels as if he can’t help himself, and accepts the dregs of Jonghyun’s various drinks as he passes them over for safe-keeping while he dances, sipping and mixing his alcohols thoughtlessly. 

Taemin curls into his side again, smiling and soothing him into a sleepy stupor on the couch. As far as Jinki remembers, there is no bar-fight, and there is no blood splattered across the concrete as it would be at the scene of a crime, though his memory fades many songs before that would happen. It becomes a blur of sounds and sights, centering on a face in the corner of the room, someone staring almost through him, pale green eyes too knowing. 

He chooses to believe in his memory, this time, though the burning gaze of the person he’s forgotten unsettles him, despite the way it floats around in his dreams, like two pale leaves on the surface of a disturbed pond.

Come sunrise, he carefully blinks his eyes open to see Minho still sitting in the room.

It’s strange in a way that he hadn’t expected to see something so unusual. The regular space that he’s become accustomed to waking up in each morning is decidedly disrupted by Minho’s presence, by his serious and stern expression. His familiar weight is unwelcomed by the disarray of the room and its comfortable flatness, and Jinki’s almost swayed into the same emotion. 

And then it hits him - Minho is here, and this is _different,_ in a time when nothing more than superficially is. Jinki startles, rising to a sitting position. Mostly, he does this because Minho’s eyes are trained on him, and he knows that Minho has seen that he’s awake.

“What did you do?” Minho asks, before Jinki’s even absolutely blinked the sleep from his eyes. 

He shakes his head, confused, still vaguely unsettled by the fact that Minho is sitting here, and something he did had an effect on the course of events he’s been experiencing for seemingly an eternity. 

“I know you did something,” Minho continues, “because I’ve had the same exact interactions with everyone today as I did yesterday. This morning is the same as yesterday morning, down to the date on my phone, and the only weird thing I remember yesterday is that you told me to act in a certain way, as if you knew that something bad would happen if I didn’t.” 

“No, I-well, maybe I did make you aware of it, but this isn’t new,” Jinki cuts off, sighs, shakes his head a few more times. He almost can’t believe this. Minho is _here,_ and he has a memory of the today that was yesterday, no less. “I haven’t _done_ anything, except talk to you yesterday.” 

Minho frowns. The confused way his face pulls and the feeling that it conveys to Jinki is almost becoming too familiar, after the amount of times he’s seen it the last couple days. “Then why is today the same as yesterday?” He murmurs, almost as if to himself. 

Jinki blinks a few times, thinks about if he can possibly explain to Minho how today being the same as yesterday is the only thing he’s known for a long time. In the end, because he can’t find a better way to phrase it, he says just that. 

Minho’s expression cycles through various stages, ever the type to show exactly what he’s feeling on his face. Jinki almost feels bad, at one point, as he lets Minho process the idea that this has been happening for ages, because Minho somehow looks like he’s about to cry. “How long?” He ends up asking, after a long silence. 

“I think over a month, now,” Jinki murmurs. “Maybe longer, because I only woke up after a long time.”

“Shit,” Minho curses, leaning forward to place his head in his hands. “What are we going to do about it? How do we move past this?” 

Jinki laughs, but it’s hollow, empty of the type of joy he would usually fill it with. “That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out.” 

“Was I your first, like… experiment? Did I change something by waking up, today?” Minho then asks, looking back up at him as if he’s just realized something.

Nodding, Jinki offers, “You’re definitely different. I didn’t really think about changing anything for a while, even though I was aware. I just wanted to see what would happen, and then I wanted to know why things weren’t happening, and what I didn’t remember.” 

Minho seems scared to ask, but he does anyways, as if he’s pulling it out of himself, “What usually happens, that night?” 

It’s like an interrogation, being asked so many questions, and Jinki really, really didn’t expect this to ever happen. Then again, he’s not sure what he ever thought would happen - he, too, had questions, and the only method he had of answering them was careful observation. 

“Usually, Pancake tries to hit on you, I think,” Jinki recalls, “and then Taeng-mo gets pissed and starts a bar fight. I didn’t want to see you get hurt after the first time I was sober enough to remember it.” 

“I wouldn’t think he would do something like that,” Minho mumbles, looking downtrodden. Jinki can’t imagine why he feels that way - he’s only known Taeng-mo a couple days, there’s barely any trust to break. “I really get hurt, every day, over and over, and wake up again hours before it happens?”

“Yeah.” He looks away from Minho, noticing the way the light through the window has moved and brightened. It’s getting later than he usually stays in here, but who cares? If he shows up later to the pool, it surely can’t be important enough to cause change. Silence falls over the room for a while, and Jinki settles himself in it, trying to readjust to the idea that there’s someone else besides him who will remember this exchange. 

“Do you think if everyone wakes up like you and me did, this will stop?” Jinki glances up at Minho, almost surprised. No, he hadn’t ever thought of it, but what else can he try. 

“What would we even change? I just talked to you on an impulse, I wouldn’t know where to begin to wake the others up.” Jinki thinks about them, Kibum and Jonghyun and Taemin, and how their eyes light up the same way every day, how his interactions with them have started to fall flat because no matter how many times he speaks to them in slightly different ways, nothing about it ever changes. Everything follows the same course, like a river that has flowed for so long it’s carved a set path into the bedrock beneath.

Jinki sighs, leaning his forehead against the palm of his hand. “I don’t really know what to do, Minho.” 

The desk chair creaks as Minho stands up from it, crossing the small distance between them to pat Jinki on the shoulder. “We’ll figure something out,” he says, aiming for reassuring, though it sounds hollow. 

When Minho leaves the room, slipping away quietly, to rejoin the repeating day outside, the room Jinki wakes up in feels as if it always has. The feeling of irreparable change Minho brought with him stays with him, though, heavy and insistent. 

* * *

Minho likes experimenting a lot more than Jinki does, he realizes very quickly. When he finally settles into the knowledge that each morning he’ll awake to the same set of events, three days after first realizing, Minho starts jumping on every opportunity to mess with the flow that events will naturally take. 

Whenever he does so, his eyes find Jinki’s, and the look they hold is powerful and imploring. Jinki simply watches, waiting for him to understand that saying something marginally different to one of their captors won’t do anything. No matter how many times he tries to explain it to Minho, how many times he lays out verbatim exactly how different variations in conversation might go, Minho remains headstrong. 

It’s early afternoon, and they’re sitting poolside, legs kicking in the water. Jinki’s head tilts back and watches the way the leaves of the tree that borders the lot sway in the barely-there breeze. They filter the light well, keeping the concrete courtyard cool while the rest of the area swelters beneath the sun. 

Minho sighs after a long minute of silence and slides himself off the edge of the pool. There’s a loud splash as he hits the water, and Jinki’s eyes lazily turn to follow the noise. It’s the shallow end—Minho’s only in up until his waist, and the hem of his teal tank top clings to his trim figure. 

He’s got that firm set to his shoulders again as he gets more fully into the water and begins to swim breaststroke towards where Jonghyun and Taemin are in the deeper end. Jinki has learned to read him well enough over the last ten years they’ve spent together, and this all screams determination.

Taemin splashes at him when he comes too close, with the same smile Jinki’s seen a million times scrunching up his eyelids. Minho doesn’t take the bait and splash back, even after Jonghyun joins in, giggling as he taunts him. 

“What’s wrong, Minho?” Taemin crows as he tries dunking Minho, both hands firm on his shoulders as he jumps. “Too much of a coward to fight both of us?” 

Minho goes under and splutters once he comes back up, but he still doesn’t smile, instead grabbing Taemin’s wrist and telling him, “I have something to tell you two. Something important.” 

The sensation of going down the wrong path grows in Jinki’s heart, settling beneath him like it’s a law of the universe around him. Cold and unwelcoming, it doesn’t match the soothing, dappled sunshine being cast down on him. 

It’s a good thing that the pool is as small as it is, a simple oval-shaped thing that’s barely five meters long, because otherwise Jinki might not be able to hear the quiet conversation that follows. 

“Everything okay, Minho?” Jonghyun asks, voice flooding with comfort and caring. One of his hands comes up from the water, landing on Minho’s shoulder in a much softer way than Taemin’s had minutes before. 

“Not at all,” Minho says shakily. “This is fucked up.” He’s been facing away from Jinki this whole time, but Jinki can almost imagine the expression accompanying that voice. It’s not an encouraging one. 

Taemin frowns and bounces a little in the water, obviously to release some of his own nerves. “You’re worrying me, Minho-hyung. Sorry for calling you a coward.” 

Minho’s low-timbre laugh carries easily across the calm water. “It’s not about that, thanks. I just… this is hard to explain.” 

The other two’s concerned expressions slowly turn to pure confusion as Minho tries to establish the situation, and Jinki immediately knows he’s failed. Minho seems to have noticed he’s not getting through to them, too, shoulders slumping. He eventually drops it and simply sinks into the water, floating on his back towards the small region of the pool that’s fully under the light of the sun. 

Jinki pokes at him with one foot when he drifts close enough, but Minho doesn’t open his eyes and look at him. His eyebrows cut deep furrows in his brow. 

Jonghyun doesn’t show up there the next day, and the knowledge pokes at Jinki like the sticky seeds of the indigenous plants here sometimes do. Minho doesn’t seem to have noticed. His considering and somewhat frustrated gaze is fixed only on Taemin’s slim figure as he splashes around in the pool, dip-dyed purple hair turning black at the ends as it gets soaked. 

“Taemin, where were you earlier today?” Minho asks all of a sudden. Taemin’s started diving underwater and coming back up in strange poses periodically, and Minho has to ask a couple times before Taemin hears the full question. 

He shakes the water out of his hair like a dog, but it sticks flat to his head anyways as he tilts it to one side and says, “Hanging out with Jonghyun-hyung and Jao-chou, why?” 

The look Minho sends Jinki before his next question is pointed, eyes sharp. “And what time did you wake up for that? Maybe we could all have fun together tomorrow.” 

Understanding, clear as the cerulean water of the pool he’s lounging in, runs through Jinki. Tomorrow, in Taemin’s mind, doesn’t mean the same thing as it does in the reality of himself and Minho, as he’s still under the impression that tomorrow will bring a whole new day. To them, though, tomorrow would be today again. If they could break into Taemin’s routine on another version of today, they could understand how to get through to him. 

Jinki is still foggy on how that even became the plan, though. He hadn’t expected any of this to ever happen, and how the hell would they help Taemin in that day, with no ideas or leads? Jinki grabs his elbow and steers him away from the group when they start to leave. 

“What are you planning?” He asks lowly. 

Fronds of the big, leafy plant he’d led them into the shade of brush against Minho’s hair as he shakes his head. “It’s obvious, right?” 

“I know we have to wake them up, we established that much. But how do you really expect to do that?” 

“You must’ve realized there’s nothing big enough going on at the pool,” Minho explains. “If we’re going to shock him or change his day enough for it to make an impact, we’re going to have to do it somewhere else.” 

Frustration claws at Jinki, because he _knows_ that already, and Minho won’t stop laying out information that isn’t new to him. “Do you even know that there’s going to be something worth changing in his morning?”

He hadn’t meant to snap, but it came out that way, and Minho yanks his arm out of Jinki’s grip, grinding out, “We have a whole eternity to work on this. We may as well investigate all the options.” Minho brushes past him, the warmth of his skin against Jinki’s only fleeting. Regardless, it clings to him like a bad reminder. 

The next thing Jinki hears is the clang of the courtyard’s gate, and he’s left alone to swallow the harsh truth of forever in a day once again. 

* * *

Jinki isn’t sure how Taemin manages to enjoy himself when the sun is beating down mercilessly on them, but it’s happening. Taemin races ahead of both him and Minho with a huge grin on his face, riding one of the few bikes Jinki hadn’t realized would be parked in the courtyard of their captors’ tiny building. Minho’s arms are hot where they cling against Jinki, the other man having been delegated to passenger on the puttering old rig Taemin had left them to. It’s uncomfortably hot, too hot to even think. 

Taemin is cruel and coldblooded for putting them through all of this, Jinki decides as more sweat drips past his brow. He blinks it away, trying his best to ignore the humidity that hugs him like a hot blanket and instead focus on taking in the events going on before him.

Observation, as usual, is key; but Jinki feels off-balanced with how unfamiliar this set of events is. Instead of letting him wake up naturally, at the same time as ever, Minho had barged into Jinki’s small room at the crack of dawn and dragged him out of bed by his arms with Taemin. The purpose, they both claimed, was to have fun and explore all day, but the glance Minho sent Jinki over the top of Taemin’s head told him that he hadn’t forgotten the actual goal of that day. 

The day became more confusing from there, with Taemin leading the way through dusty, forgotten side streets until they have reached this point. The street here, thankfully, is wide enough for two, with scraggly grass growing on either side. Jinki would guess they might be close to water, with the white sand he sees flying everywhere, but it’s too hot to even fathom. 

“Uhh,” Taemin laughs after another half-kilometer, slowing his bike down until he’s riding side-by-side with Jinki’s own, “I might be lost.” 

It begins happening every day from there, in the same exact pattern, no matter how much Jinki or Minho try to disrupt it. Taemin will drag them out to go exploring, promptly drive off the beaten path, and spend the whole day guiding them in confused circles. They barely ever make it back in time to join the party, haphazardly parking their bikes anywhere along the empty streets and running to the warehouse with the sunset slanting gold over their shoulders. It’s fun, for the first few days, but Jinki feels trapped here, more than he ever had before. Taemin’s lost in a way that goes past literal—he’s seemingly impossible to wake up. 

Hopelessness bears down on him, slowing his steps as they make their way to the party once more. He lets his sneakers scuff along the pavement, and Minho notices after he’s nearly inside, head turning to watch. 

“You feel it too, right?” Jinki asks when he catches up. They’re standing in the threshold of the warehouse now, an empty concrete door frame that spans wider than both of them combined. Minho’s face is halfway shadowed in the dramatic lighting. “We aren’t going to get through to him.” 

“There has to be something we haven’t thought of yet,” Minho insists. Even if there isn’t, there’s not much else they can do but keep trying. That knowledge is heavy and dreadful in Jinki’s gut. “A breakthrough has to be coming.” 

With a sigh, Jinki pushes past Minho and into the warehouse, ducking past a number of unoccupied rooms and into the one that serves as the party’s typical location. For such a large building, it’s strange that it goes unused, but Jinki thinks nothing of it; after all, nothing here is inhabited, all the people seemingly vanished as soon as this started in earnest. 

The party, at least, brings the comforting sensation of being around other people. Jinki lets the bass carry him to the dance floor immediately, wanting to feel close without having to think as much as he does all day. Jonghyun is there, doing a ridiculously bad freestyle with Pancake. He giggles and cajoles Jinki until he joins in with jerky steps that don’t hit in time with the beat. 

“You’re awful at this!” Pancake laughs, swaying in a way that isn’t quite able to be qualified as dancing. “Where’s your group’s dancer?” She raises her voice more and calls over the music, “Taemin?” 

Jinki twirls around a few times, looking for a familiar head of purple and silver. He’s shockingly difficult to find in the uncrowded room, but Jinki finally spots him halfway sliding off a barstool. Minho’s beside him, talking to him with a focused look, hands moving wildly as he explains something. Taemin doesn’t seem interested, laughing and nodding before taking a few sips of his own beer. He looks like he’d be willing to be pulled away for a dance or five. 

“Taemin!” He calls, making his way across the floor. Taemin’s head shoots up instantly, posture straightening as he sees Jinki coming towards him. “Wanna come hang out over here?” 

Taemin looks at him like Jinki is his savior, eyes big and thankful as he hops off the barstool to follow him back out. “I just don’t know what Minho-hyung’s on about sometimes,” he says in Jinki’s ear over the music. 

With a laugh, Jinki grabs Taemin’s lean arm and pulls him forward some more, until he’s fully in the makeshift circle that he and the other two make up. Pancake claps with joy, her short hair bouncing as she dances, and says loudly, “Put on a show for us, Taemin!” 

“What do you want me to do?” Taemin asks, confusion clearly painted on his face. Normally he might tease and pretend to do something sensual, dropping to the floor with an exaggerated motion, but the alcohol must be turning his thoughts towards the more literal. 

Jinki pats his back and suggests, “Do our new dance! For _View_.” 

It’s nearly impossible to see in the dim of the room, but Jinki’s standing right next to Taemin. He sees how Taemin’s face seems to tighten up for a moment, how the curve of his eyes goes from something excited and willing to dismayed. It passes quickly, but it stays with Jinki even after Taemin teasingly cries that they shouldn’t spoil it and instead makes up moves on the spot.

* * *

Taemin’s made them stop for a break, claiming the midday sun made him thirsty. They pile the motorbikes they’ve ridden next to an unmanned corner store, and then Taemin commands Minho to get drinks for all three of them from inside. 

“ _I’m_ older than you,” Minho stubbornly retorts, “ _you_ should do it.” He steps away regardless, as if he was just arguing for posterity’s sake. Taemin laughs and wraps an arm around Jinki’s shoulder, knocking into him as he sways from side to side on the bench in front of the storefront window. 

It’s a nice day, when you can ignore the oppressive heat of it, cloudless and bright. But all iterations of this day are. Jinki’s eyes scan the area, even though there’s nothing new to see. More buildings, a mix of old and new architecture, all made pale over time by the sun. Trees rise up behind them, a green strip of what Jinki knows would be life; if the neverending mindlessness of this repeating day could be considered a life, or if he knew that life outside their ragtag group still existed. With no sign of the contrary, all humans and animals seeming to have left them behind, it’s hard to argue that it does. 

“Being on vacation is fun,” Taemin says all of a sudden, breaking the silence that had fallen over the two of them. “No responsibilities.” He says it like he means it, but the haze over his eyes doesn’t tell Jinki the same thing. 

Jinki shrugs. Taemin’s arm is still all over him, as if he’s forgotten to take it back, and the light sheen of sweat that sticks them both together is a little uncomfortable. 

“It’ll be good to go back to the stage, though,” Taemin continues, tone going wistful. It’s like he’s just stumbled upon the thought for the first time, a seasoned actor going off-script in a performance he’s done forever. “I think I’ll get more strength from this and be able to perform better.” 

The words make Jinki remember what he hasn’t actually forgotten—the way Taemin’s face fell when he was asked about their own song. It had bothered him throughout the night, but he hadn’t had another chance to bring it up, between then and the whirlwind of action Taemin always led him and Minho through. 

This has to be his chance. 

Jinki grabs onto that, staring down at his knobbly knees as he thinks of a response. Taemin knows him well enough that he won’t mind it, impatient as he may get. Jinki takes a deep breath in before saying, falsely casual, “You know how our choreo goes? All loose and easy? That’ll look good when you’re energetic like this.” 

Taemin’s arm slumps off of Jinki’s shoulder, and he turns his head away from Jinki. “I—” 

His sentence is cut off from whatever it was about to be as Minho exits the store, the bell hung over it jingling and interrupting the absolute quiet that hangs over the world. 

“I got you a melon soda, Taemin,” he starts, drinks cradled in his arms. There’s more than enough for the three of them, and Jinki wonders how he plans to take the rest with them when there’s no storage compartments on their old bikes. “Well, there was no one inside, so I kind of just took it. But it’s for you.” 

Seemingly relieved, Taemin shoots a thankful smile towards Minho, arm outstretched for the drink. After he hands it over, Minho gives Jinki his own, squeezing between them on the bench. Jinki’s almost falling off one side, now, but being that close together gives him the opportunity to talk right into Minho’s ear. 

“I figured out how to get to him,” he whispers. Minho draws back and turns his head enough to look at Jinki, eyes wide and wondering. One side of Jinki’s mouth quirks up in a half-smile. He glances behind Minho’s back at the gentle, thoughtful frown Taemin’s wearing. Louder than before, voice pitched to reach Taemin as well, Jinki continues, “we should practice so we don’t get out of shape, right Taemin?” 

Taemin stays seated as the other two stand, face turned up to them with a blank expression. “I don’t…” He trails off, seemingly unable to continue, and just looks at them. Something’s changing in his eyes, a slowly dawning dreadful feeling that Jinki is intimately familiar with, but can’t put into words. 

“What’s wrong, Taemin?” Minho asks, genuinely concerned, leaning down a little and putting one hand on each of Taemin’s thin shoulders. Jinki lets him take the lead, standing to one side with his hands tucked in his jean shorts’ pockets. 

Taemin shakes his head, looking up at the sky, at the burning light of the sun. His eyes look different, like the fog in them has lifted somewhat. “Has this sky always been this bright? Why can’t I remember?” 

Minho shifts uneasily, says, “What can’t you remember?” 

“Everything,” Taemin sighs, still staring out at the blue hanging above them, voice thick. “I don’t know how we got here. I don’t know our choreo… I worked so hard trying to learn it until now…” 

Jinki leans in a little, heart breaking for Taemin as he blinks down at the pavement. This situation is so wrong, fundamentally; he just wants out, wants to take his members and run until they’re far away from here. But for now, all he can do is try to help Taemin through his realization. “Let’s run through it together, Taemin-ah, it’ll make sense then.” 

Taemin goes along with it like there’s nothing else he can do, helplessly standing up and shaking out his limbs. Minho leads them in the choreo, his long legs confident in every move, and Jinki makes sure to go a little slower and emphasizes every move he makes, conscious of Taemin’s watchful eyes on him. 

They tap out the steps together, counting every beat and going through the motions until they’re all drenched in sweat, feet aching from dancing in these ill-fit shoes. Something familiar starts to bloom in Taemin’s expression halfway through their fourth run, and he makes them stop. Then he moves to face them both and starts again, with more confidence and resolve. 

He smiles big as he reaches the final steps, energy overflowing in his flourishing motions. “Is that right?” He asks as soon as he’s done, looking at them both with fire in his eyes. “I don’t know why I forgot it before, but I feel like… I’m whole again.” 

Jinki and Minho cheer for him, patting his back as he leans down to open his soda. They exchange a look behind his back, one of determination and triumph. Beneath that, though, Jinki feels his heart tip back into the turmoil he’s kept simmering inside him all along. It absorbs his focus as Minho tugs Taemin aside, both smiling. He doesn’t know why, exactly, but leaves them to it - let Minho attempt to explain the situation to Taemin, let Minho be the one to see the crumbling realization on Taemin’s face when he finally understands. 

Jinki needs time, as he always does. He tilts his head back, standing statue-still in the middle of the street, and stares up at the clouds. The time he takes is used to think. 

This is happening, somehow, and though none of the situation is new, Jinki still can’t wrap his head around it. How do the plants not grow, how have the animals and people of the planet left them all behind? If they don’t, why does the wind still blow? Why are they doomed to this? And furthermore, is it even doom—Jinki’s seen and felt it himself, the changes in the fabric of the day after he’s woken up the other two. It’s almost like messing up an embroidering project, he thinks, recalling the way his mother tried to introduce him to the hobby when he was eight. He’d been awful at it, making a mess of the pre-patterned fabrics, and though his mother would carefully unstitch the parts he ruined and redo them, the overall design remained the same. 

Someone had to start this, though, and Jinki wonders who and why. Was it fun to watch them all, scrambling around to fix something that they never could? Was the person behind all this laughing at his ridiculous attempts to escape what now seemed to be his eternal fate? Jinki turns his head slightly and stares at the few clouds gathering in the sky. They’re puffy and thin, fading away to nothing at the edges. His mind feels just as full of them, translucent and obfuscating; they hide his thoughts from him and fill him with slow worries. 

He recalls the piercing gaze of the one he can never remember the name of: his kidnapper with messy black hair cascading down her shoulders as she watches him from every corner and shadow. Her eyes always seem too aware, her smile twisting too cruelly. Even the splash of blue on her shirt bothers him, splotching in a pattern that reminds Jinki of a butterfly. 

Maybe that’s his lead. Maybe she knows something he doesn’t. 

* * *

Jinki had planned over the course of last night to finally confront her head-on, to involve her in a conversation and learn what lurked behind her eyes. During the party, the one time they typically shared a space, Jinki would ask her outside and talk there. It was decided that way for one reason only: he knew she would be there. He knew the other places she went daily, half-remembered schedule passed along through information from various other members, but it seemed the safest bet. Besides, he didn’t know where she was in the early mornings—the only obscured part of her day. 

Perhaps that is why he’s so surprised when he stumbles into the claustrophobic kitchen that morning after waking up and sees her seated at the round wooden table, ruining his plan in one fell swoop. It feels almost too mundane an image; a girl in her early twenties with a half-empty chipped coffee cup before her, shirt hanging off one shoulder. The blue of the top contrasts against the faded, sunny yellow of the walls. Jinki feels like he misread the type of person she could be, now, all the danger and mystique gone. She glances up at Jinki, who looks back at her with wide, surprised eyes. 

“Oh,” he says, off-guard. 

“Do you need something?” She asks. He wonders for a moment what she means, and almost says _‘answers’_ before she continues, “Coffee maker’s to your left.” 

It had been by sheer accident that he had woken up earlier than usual that morning, by no influence of Minho or Taemin or anyone else, not even willing himself into it starting from the night before. He wonders why this change happened, knowing it’d be pointless to ask. He wonders what she’s doing here right now next, and figures it’d be an easier question. So he asks. 

“I’m having breakfast,” she says with a twist of her face that says he’s weird for asking. It is her house, after all, he supposes. And somehow she fits her house perfectly, both labyrinthine and messy, mysterious by sheer merit of their existence. “What are _you_ doing here right now?” 

He seats himself across from her, in one of the free rickety chairs. It doesn’t matter that she hasn’t invited him to, not really. “Trying to talk to you.” 

“And what do you want to talk about,” she states more than she asks, bringing her cup to her lips and taking a long sip. “You’ve never adjusted your daily schedule this much, it must be important.” 

Jinki’s eyebrows quirk, and he wishes he’d taken her up on the offer of coffee before he sat down, because he has no excuse to pause and nothing to do with his hands. He puts them on the table, loosely lacing the fingers. “It wasn’t by choice. But you’re aware of all this, too?” 

“You ruined my morning, you know, taking Taemin out of it,” she says, as much of an answer as it is a non-sequitur to a new topic, “He was always the funnest. Jonghyun’s too self-aware, not the best to play with for a long time.” 

“Why did you do this?” He hadn’t meant to say it, but it comes out anyways, suspicion coloring his tone. 

“Do what?” She laughs. It’s loose and scratchy, like a fallen leaf on pavement, or the crumbling wing of a dead bug. “You’re here because you wanted to be.” 

Jinki’s brow furrows, and he stares down at the whorls of the old wooden table. “No, I didn’t. You kidnapped us.” 

He remembers her name then; of course, it’s been said so many times to him by so many people that the fact he’d ever forgotten it had been less than reasonable. Jao-chou’s eyes follow his own around the room, meeting them every so often as they sit in silence. He figures she has no response to that; after all, it’s the truth. 

“You weren’t kidnapped,” she suddenly responds. “It isn’t kidnapping if you’re willing to go. You want things to stay the same, don’t you? You still do, because otherwise…” She trails off, scratches a finger against the grain of the wood, and turns her head to stare at the door. 

No one walks through, but Jinki gets the feeling that on another day, in another version of this day, maybe someone would. The silence grows heavy and thick between them. He lets his eyes follow the slope of her nose as her profile is presented to him, and tries not to think about what she just said to him, though a chilled feeling prowls inside him. As much as he doesn't trust her yet, he knows her words ring true; something deep inside him thrums with it, and that terrifies Jinki. If he is only still here because one of his members wanted them to be, how would any of them ever get out of this? Even if he continues with his plan to wake them all up, will the change be enough to break them out of this cycle? 

* * *

There is a storm visible on the horizon through the window when Jinki blinks open his eyes, facing it. Dark clouds swoop low and pillowy, heavy at the bottom and towering so high into the atmosphere that Jinki can’t see the tops of them. The whole sky is covered, and as he watches, parts of it break open, downpours falling in the distance, creating temporary bridges between the land and the clouds.

He doesn’t remember having a nightmare - and anyways, he can never remember what he dreams of, since he got here - but he’s sweaty in a way that freezes the light sheet over him to his skin, as if he’s just woken from one. Jinki gasps for breath. The air is heavy, laden with electricity and humidity, and he can barely suck in enough air to get his bearings. 

“Oh god,” he mutters to himself, sitting up and turning around, facing away from the window, fear gripping him like a cold vice. He can’t see it this way, but he’s still all too aware that it exists. 

There has never been a storm, in all his months spent traversing this single day. Not once has the weather been anything except for sunny. He stares at his hands, fisted into the damp off-white sheet until the points of his knuckles are almost just as white. They’re shaking. 

Thunder claps behind him, loud and insistent. It rattles around in his chest like the speeding beat of his heart. He can’t seem to calm down, this shift in the usual routine flow of the day unsettling him more than he can cope with. 

Air flows sluggishly through the window, blowing the sheer curtains to brush against his back and hair every few moments, like the world is breathing against the nape of his neck. He doesn’t know why the small standing fan has been turned off, and this small change in the room unsettles him just as much as the loom of the storm. 

No, he’s going to be optimistic about it, about just this one thing. Perhaps Minho has just turned it off, to let him know he came into the room earlier. 

Jinki doesn’t know where Minho went, doesn’t know if Taemin is still awake; after the day he had yesterday, he feels like everything he’d done is slipping through his fingers, like Jao-chou’s words had been waves washing over castles and characters he’d carefully built from sand. 

Anxiety creeps up on him despite his resolve to remain even the slightest bit positive. Maybe no one is awake at all, anymore, except for him. 

Jinki looks at the digital alarm clock that’s sat haphazardly on the desk facing the bed. The blue numbers have always flashed bright and persistent at him, though he’s never had a reason to give the clock more than a passing glance. He’s always told the time through the constant beat of sunlight against his eyelids and the angle at which it slanted into the room through the big picture windows whenever he woke up. He focuses on the clock now, however, because there _is_ no sunlight to use as reference. 

It’s past noon; later than he’s ever woken up. He swallows rough in his throat, and carefully stands up. He makes sure to keep his back to the windows as he makes his way to the bedroom’s door, peeking out hesitantly. 

Only silence meets him, and Jinki sighs. The apartment is definitely empty - that hasn’t changed. He isn’t sure if the emotion twisting in his gut is fear, relief, or something _else_ , something unnamed and huge. 

Carefully he makes his way through the apartment, padding through the yellow-painted rooms and picking across various messes strewn across the tile floors. It bothers him, the sunny color of the walls - he isn’t sure that’s what color they were yesterday. The lack of light from the sun casts them in a dull shade, like there’s a gray filter over everything. 

The hallways are narrow from the amount of random objects piled to their sides, and Jinki pauses as he passes the closed doors to the other bedrooms, feeling claustrophobic as he faces them. There is only these rooms before the end of the hallway, where it opens to the small main space. 

He can go in - alone as he is, unchanging as everything _(should be)_ is, no one would ever know that he intruded on their privacy. But what would he really find of interest? Jao-chou’s gaze swims through his head again, those eyes like sharpened chips of jade, and they twirl into the hard glass of the bottle Taeng-mo used to smash over Minho’s skull, so long ago. 

The air is still heavy and stifling as he breathes it in deeply, turning from the doors. Nothing he finds in there could be worth the knowledge it wouldn’t bring. Jao-chou couldn’t answer his questions in any real way, what makes him think that any trinkets found in her room or Pancake’s or the closet-sized room where Jonghyun and Kibum stuff themselves into would? 

It’s almost shocking how much more open it feels in the combination living room-kitchenette-dining space he walks out into, now that it’s settled into its own emptiness for a few hours. Jinki moves to sit at one of the wobbly chairs around the abandoned table, a circular wooden thing with napkins and empty glasses placed forgotten along it. One still has dregs of an iced cafe au lait in it, and Jinki takes it in his hand, watching the lukewarm liquid swirl in his grasp. The somewhat separated milk and coffee inside mixes together a little more. He sets it back on the table with a tap which echoes too loud for the small space. 

Jinki’s never felt this directionless in a day. He’s also never woken up so late. He sighs, hard, and resigns himself to thinking. Not much could still be experimented with in a day like this, because after all, where can he go? He isn’t sure how the scenes he’s familiar with will change without himself in them, or where he might reinsert himself into their flow. It allows a certain amount of freedom as well, though. He doesn’t have to restrain himself to the scenes he knows - he can search for one he’s never been, place himself inside it and make changes he hasn’t considered before. 

He remembers the days he used to experience, before he woke up, the ones that melted like watercolor and melded together, emotions not his own mixing into his hazy views. He’s never been able to get back to those events again, has never been able to understand what was his and what was not from those memories. 

The front door, a dusty gray thing with a knob that’s rusting to black at the edges, unlocks with a loud noise, and Jinki’s head shoots up to watch as it creaks open. 

Jonghyun steps into the room, scrubbing his bleached hair into an even fluffier, messier piece of work than it usually is. He seems serious, but when he glances up and sees Jinki, his eyes light up like he’s gotten a surprise gift. 

“Oh! You’re actually awake!” He exclaims, coming towards Jinki with a wide smile pushing his cheeks up. Jinki smiles back at him, confused. This is one of those paths he’s never been able to take, obviously, as none of the way Jonghyun slides himself into a chair and steals the coffee before Jinki seems familiar. 

“I don’t know why,” Jonghyun continues between sips of the cafe au lait, “but I have a feeling you’re usually asleep right now.” The rim of the cup is chipped, Jinki notices when Jonghyun sets it back down, having drained it quickly. 

Jinki blinks. He doesn’t know if it’s deja vu, or something on the verge of awareness and memory, but Jonghyun seems to be skirting around knowing things somehow, and that’s _interesting._ “Of course I should be,” he bluffs, not willing to tip Jonghyun off or make him suspicious by letting the pause linger too long. “We’ve been given a vacation for once, being awake is a bad way to use it.” 

Jonghyun hums, leaning more into Jinki’s personal space. Jinki welcomes it, because Jonghyun has always had an easy sense of skinship that grounds Jinki, and his familiar warmth helps him forget the storm that looms and threatens to break open outside. 

Over the last few months, he’s missed Jonghyun a lot - their paths haven’t often come together, besides at the bar or in the pool. Those interactions have grown old and tired, though, and Jinki could probably recite every path they take. The things Jonghyun says now, routine as they may be, feel fresh to Jinki, and he revels in it. 

“I know one way,” Jonghyun says without elaboration. “Wanna come with me?” His bangs fall almost into his eyes, and Jinki doesn’t lean up and brush them aside. Though he knows the action would have no consequence come morning, he doesn’t want to do anything too unusual on his first loop through this version of today. He simply smiles back at Jonghyun and agrees easily, wanting to see where this leads.

“There’s not really any good snacks in here, so...” Jonghyun complains over his shoulder, moving like he just expects Jinki to follow him to the door and out into the courtyard. Which, of course, he does. 

The small stone and wood shrines huddled at the edge of the courtyard are a familiar sight as they make their way down the stone steps and towards the iron gate of the property, but Jinki is almost uncomfortable seeing them in this overcast light. The texture of the stone is like a rougher version of the clouds lingering above, and he frowns, looking at the back of Jonghyun’s head instead. 

Somehow, there is no wind with this storm - it just sits, each cloud sluggishly waiting to reach its own breaking point. The leaves of the plants overflowing from the courtyard’s planting beds don’t shift with any breeze, and the heat feels oppressive, despite the fact that storms should be cooling. 

“Weird how it’s so cloudy,” Jonghyun comments as they walk around aimlessly, obviously picking up on the way Jinki keeps glancing up at the clouds like they’re bothering him. “I didn’t think it was going to rain, yesterday, but I guess weather around here is different than you’d expect.” 

“I thought it would be sunny, too,” Jinki mutters, unable to keep the unease out of his voice. 

Jonghyun shrugs, and they keep walking along. The world seems dimmer and easier to process without the seething heat and light of the sun that usually blinds him, but Jinki doesn’t enjoy it. The streets are totally empty, cars abandoned and sidewalks barren of people other than themselves. The streetlights he sees don’t change, winking a constant red at him. 

It’s obvious that Jonghyun doesn’t even notice any of it, because he seems genuinely dismayed when they reach a specific point of his mental route, stopping and exclaiming, “It’s supposed to be here!” 

“What is?” Jinki asks. There’s nothing of particular note where they stand; it’s just another street corner, with cracked concrete making up its sidewalk. 

“The noodle vendor,” Jonghyun says, shoulders drooping. “Don’t you remember, from yesterday?” 

Yesterday, to Jinki, is a concept that actually refers to a time so long ago he’s started to forget it. But he thinks he does remember - the easy partly-cloudy afternoon sky, the laughter of everyone around him as it settled in that they really did this, that they were really free for the time being. It’s all wrapped up in the memory of the noodles, still steaming hot as they shoveled them in their mouths and ducked into alleys to avoid fans taking pictures of them. Jinki smiles, fond. He misses it, misses the easy happiness he had when he wasn’t locked in this loop. 

“That’s too bad,” he says easily, attempting a comforting tone. Jonghyun hums an agreement, but doesn’t reply. He doesn’t seem too upset by the loss, but Jinki adds, “we can always go get snacks somewhere else,” just in case he really _is_ upset and wants to focus on something else to cheer himself up. 

“Ooh!” Jonghyun gasps, as if Jinki has triggered a memory. “You’re right!” And then he’s taking off again, leaving Jinki to catch up. It’s not hard, considering how Jonghyun’s short legs keep him from gaining too much distance, but Jinki’s being blindsided by this Jonghyun; as much as he’s used to how Jonghyun acts, somehow this too-bubbly, flighty version of him is different in a way he can’t quite put his finger on.

They speed on, walking at a higher pace now, and Jinki wonders if Jonghyun really knows where he’s going, or if they’re going to get lost for the rest of the day.

He’s about to ask, because although either option will be fine in the end, he’d like some idea of what today will turn out like, but Jonghyun suddenly stops, pulling Jinki back by the wrist when Jinki steps ahead of him. He’s got his head tilted up, watching a small television screen propped up behind a glass pane, inside a closed supermarket. His eyes are devoid of the color contacts the company had him in for the whole period leading up to these events, and Jinki takes a moment to watch his eyes. They’re dark, now, and it’s not shady enough here for them to reflect the light of the screen, but Jinki fancies to himself that they should anyways. 

A confused frown is scoring Jonghyun’s face, now, as he watches. Jinki’s eyes flicker up to the screen to see why - never mind that he can’t recall a single instance of a television working on this day, because this one is, somehow. It displays a shaky clip of three individuals getting inside a white van, faces covered by black ski masks, followed by footage of themselves, SHINee, stepping into the same van. Underneath is written a headline in Thai, scrolling along the bottom of the screen in bright red and black. 

“That’s strange,” Jonghyun mutters under his breath. At least Jinki isn’t the only one who feels that way. The footage is unsettling, like it was warped slightly, and everything about it seems slightly wrong. 

Jonghyun doesn’t look away from the television, even though it’s not showing anything else except that same thirty-second reel, until Jinki pulls him by the wrist, urging him to start walking again. Even after, he seems more subdued, less willing to lead the way when Jinki prods him as to where they should go next. His steps are halting and his shoes scuff along the pavement. 

“Where were we going, again?” Jonghyun asks after five blocks of this. 

“Snacks?” Jinki prompts, tilting his head a little to glance at Jonghyun. His eyes are turned down, fixed on the cracks in the sidewalk, as if he’s too busy thinking to waste time on seeing what’s in front of him.

A flicker of recognition enters his expression, and he looks up, frowning at Jinki. “Sorry, I just spaced out,” Jonghyun says. “I don’t know why, I feel so… off, today.” 

Jinki brushes Jonghyun’s hand with his own, reassuring, because he’s not sure yet what he should do about this whole day. Jonghyun seems to refocus, leading them a couple more blocks to a squat supermarket with the sliding glass doors propped open an inch. Jonghyun pries them open wide enough for them to slip in, and beelines for a cart.

Jinki remembers, suddenly - he should be sitting in that cart. Before he became aware, he would sit in that cart and smile as Jonghyun rained snacks down on him, laughter lighting them both up. 

There’s no laughter now, not really, as they aimlessly wander the aisles. Jinki points at a row of crunchy snacks with their names written in bubbly Thai fonts, and says, “these ones are your favorite, aren’t they?” 

“I’ve never had these,” Jonghyun replies, picking one up and examining the packaging. He doesn’t sound sure about his statement, even though he makes no move to say anything else. The snacks drop into the cart, cushioned by a few other packages, and they move on. 

Someone else should be here with them, Jinki knows. Someone with long, flowing hair, who looked at Jonghyun and Jinki and felt like they were celestial, beyond her, and yet captured like butterflies in a glass jar for her. Jinki knows the feeling as if it were his own, but it’s not - it’s Jao-chou’s, he thinks, because there is no other explanation in his mind. She’s the missing piece of this scene. Jao-chou’s presence cut out like a figure from a magazine, leaving nothing but a tattered page behind, stands out to him even as they continue their wayward path through the supermarket. 

They, of course, don’t pay for their snacks - there is no one behind the cashier’s till, no one else in the shop but themselves. It’s easy to simply walk out when they’re done. Jinki doubts that the camera positioned over the door is turned on to capture them in the act of stealing, though its light still blinks red, a warning that will go unheeded. 

The cart rattles in the easy silence between him and Jonghyun as they continue walking. He’s given up wondering where Jonghyun might be leading them, and turned inwards, trying to figure out how this day proceeds inside his only memory of it.

After they leave, Jinki remembers, their paths split a little - Jonghyun falls behind as he and Jao-chou run ahead. They rejoin in the end, he knows, but how? All he has is the image of seeing himself, pressed against a wall in that abandoned warehouse, and then - 

“Oh, Jao-chou!” Jonghyun’s exclamation shakes Jinki out of the thoughts he was losing himself inside of, and he looks up to see Jao-chou standing in the entryway of a dilapidated, squat concrete building. She smiles at Jonghyun, who continues, “I was wondering where you were when you weren’t in the apartment. When I came back for Jinki.” 

“I had things to take care of,” Jao-chou replies, purposefully vague. The look she sends Jinki’s way isn’t vague at all, though. She steps forwards, across the few short meters separating her from the two of them, and peers down into the cart. “Did you get everything I wanted?”

“Ah, I’m pretty sure, but I don’t know your taste yet,” Jonghyun has a teasing lilt in his voice as he says it, like they’re already friends. Jinki doesn’t let himself frown, but he knows how sharp his eyes can seem when he’s not smiling, which he isn’t. He can’t say he likes the idea of the two of them being friends - Jao-chou unsettles him, still. 

Jao-chou pouts and paws through the assortment a little. “Aw, you forgot my _favorites,_ Jonghyun!” 

“Which ones are those?” Jonghyun shifts a little, repositions his hands on the cart. 

“All the ones you didn’t get, of course,” Jao-chou teases again, grinning up at him. It’s the first time Jinki’s seen her smile, and although he’s not the one it’s directed at, it does make her look more approachable than she does in his nightmares. “Can you go back and at least get some drinks? There’s nothing in here…”

Sighing, Jonghyun relents, pulling the cart back towards himself. “Sure, sure. Anything else, Your Highness?” 

“Hmm,” Jao-chou hums before reaching around and grabbing Jinki’s fingers. “Nope. Me and Jinki will wait inside; it looks like it’s about to rain.” 

His fingers feel like they’re burning where Jao-chou touches them, not out of any embarrassment or desire but out of discomfort. Jinki doesn’t know why she thinks they’re friends, or why she wants to act like it in front of Jonghyun. He sends a smile Jonghyun’s way anyways, one of the smaller ones that he reserves just for Jonghyun, and follows her into the building. 

So they’re back where they should be, he supposes as his feet cross the threshold - Jonghyun is lagging behind, and he and Jao-chou are in here alone. She drops his hand as soon as they’re inside, but leads him towards one of the stairwells, stomping up it in silence. 

“You know about today, right?” Jinki asks as soon as they reach the second floor, where Jao-chou decides to make her way down the hallway. It’s dark here, shaded from the dim light of the sun, and cool compared to anywhere else he’s gone in his time here. He doesn’t know if the fact that the heat has let up is good or not. 

It’s not too dark for him to make out Jao-chou’s nod, her hair fluttering behind her unevenly. “You know about it, too.” 

Jinki laughs through his nose. “Not really. I haven’t gone down this path since before I woke up.” 

Jao-chou turns to him as they turn into one of the rooms. “But you remember it, don’t you?” 

The atmosphere of the room is awful, and Jinki feels it pressing down on him as soon as he enters. His own face and the faces of the other members stare back at him as he steps inside. The posters are interspersed with cheap paper print-outs, faded from the sun and tattered with age. These are old photos, he notices from the first glance. His hair was long back then, and so was Taemin’s. He looks away from the pictures. 

It’s at least somewhat brighter in here, the empty window panes and gaping holes in the unfinished structure of the building letting whatever light the sun can cast into the space. Jao-chou is backlit, facing him, her eyes shadowed and the loose strands of her hair a bright halo around them. 

“I do remember it,” Jinki says, hesitant to admit that much. Always unwilling to give her more information than he has to, but there is a give and take, and if he doesn’t give, he will never learn more from her. 

“So you know what happens now?” Jao-chou prompts. 

Jinki gulps, looks beyond Jao-chou’s face and at the angry shadows of the clouds outside. Most of what he knows is the betrayal and heartbreak he once felt second-hand, the feeling impressed on him like ink bleeding through a page. “What happens?” He asks, deciding to be obtuse. 

“I kiss you,” Jao-chou says, as easy as breathing, “because I want to. And then Jonghyun comes back, and he sees.” 

Oh. So that’s whose emotions he was feeling. Jinki doesn’t know why the obvious escaped him before, because it suddenly makes sense. His stomach ties itself into knots. 

“Today has been different than that, though,” Jao-chou continues, eyes focused on the mask Jinki is trying his best to keep in place. “It hasn’t been like that since you started hanging out with Minho all day.” 

Jinki shrugs. “Not like I can control what time I wake up.” 

With a hum, Jao-chou concedes the point to him. “I put today on its proper path after you two got away from me.” She looks at him with those eyes, the ones that are too knowing, jade and mint and sharp. “Do you want today on its path, or do you want to change it?” 

It’s the first time Jinki’s ever consciously been asked it. Minho always assumed that he did every day, which was true to some degree, but he’s never considered Jinki’s own slower, conservative pace of action. Taemin never asked anything, just did things by himself, far away from either of their influences. The question almost catches him off-guard, but by now he expects as much from Jao-chou, in any situation. 

He thinks. He knows he doesn’t want to kiss Jao-chou. And, now that Jao-chou has reminded him of it, he doesn’t want Jonghyun to feel how he does after he kisses her. He wants to make Jonghyun feel something different - he doesn’t know what. He just wants Jonghyun to wake up, and really, how many times is he willing to go through this strange dance of partial awareness with him until it happens? 

Jao-chou smiles when he doesn’t reply, and laughs a little. The noise is bitter, though her voice is understanding enough when she says, “of course you want change. That’s all you’ve ever wanted, Jinki.” 

The sentence tugs at him, somewhere. He blinks at her. She steps backwards a few times before saying, “don’t follow me, then,” and turning to climb down the rusty fire escape that Jinki has just noticed is hastily bolted to the side of the building. There’s no door separating it from the room, but the threshold is raised enough for her to have to make a distinct movement over it. 

It sets something right in Jinki to see her go, as bad as it sounds when he thinks as much. As soon as her head disappears down the stairs, no goodbyes said by either party, he feels like he can breathe again. The posters flutter behind him in the slight breeze running through the skeleton of this building. 

He’s not sure what he’s supposed to do now, how he can change things. Jinki leans against the wall, pressed up against the artifacts of their first five years as idols. He can almost feel the past version of himself pushing him to figure it out, creases not yet formed around his younger self’s eyes as he stares himself down, determined. 

All the previous resolutions he’d held about not messing with the events of the day are thrown out the window, now. The only question is what he can change to do something that really lasts. He wonders if Jonghyun will wake up easily, or if it’ll take something extreme, even for Jonghyun - there’s no way to tell, with this limbo Jonghyun’s in, constantly wavering between deja vu and something else. 

Jinki wonders about the kiss between himself and Jao-chou that he just aborted. He wonders why that would make Jonghyun feel dismayed - except, he knows, because how could he not, now that he’s been given a hint? 

Jonghyun has always been soft on him, doting in a way he shouldn’t be, protecting Jinki from the worst parts of their career whenever he can because that’s how he cares for Jinki. Always a little too much. 

He presses the back of his hand against his mouth, thinking. Would kissing Jonghyun instead of Jao-chou help? Would it wake him up? Would waking up like that be worse than staying in a trance forever, to Jonghyun? 

Worrying about it doesn’t do much for Jinki, but. He doesn’t want to be unsure about his decision when Jonghyun shows up, because he doesn’t know what will happen either way. Today has already changed, and besides, he has no memories after this point. Whatever comes next is brand new. 

The scuff of footsteps echoes down the hallway, and Jinki knows time’s up. He turns and waits facing the door, in the same position Jao-chou had been, for Jonghyun to poke his head in and look for him.

When he finally does, after a long while of wandering around to the other entrances, a big and genuine grin breaking across his face, Jinki smiles back at him. The rumble of the storm makes itself known again, closer and louder than it was the last time Jinki heard the thunder. 

“I thought maybe you two must’ve left by now,” Jonghyun says as he walks in, taking his own usual place just inside Jinki’s personal space. “Is she still hanging around here somewhere?”

“No, just me,” Jinki replies, and keeps smiling, “I was waiting for you.” 

Jonghyun seems content to just smile back at him for a minute, though Jinki can read the questions in his expression, the _where’s Jao-chou?_ and _are we leaving or..?_ and the question that Jinki has never had eyes to see in them before, the one linked to a memory Jonghyun won’t be able to realize he has. 

The unspoken secret that seems too obvious now: _if she isn’t kissing you, can I?_

Jinki’s beyond the point where he can think and hesitate and ponder about his potential actions. Jonghyun is here, in front of him, waiting, but surely he won’t do that forever. 

So Jinki answers that last question, leaning in and tilting his head down like he’s about to speak directly into Jonghyun’s ear. Jonghyun’s eyes widen when he realizes where Jinki’s going, and before Jinki lets his own eyes slip closed, he sees Jonghyun’s skip wildly between his eyes and his lips. 

Jonghyun breathes out a sigh of something like relief onto Jinki’s lips when they’re a millimeter over his own, and then they’re meeting. Jonghyun’s lips are still parted just the slightest bit, and they’re softer than Jinki would’ve imagined, if he ever had. The rounded tip of his nose brushes against Jinki’s cheek. 

The sky breaks open behind them, and it starts pouring. The bleached concrete building they’re trapped inside dyes itself black with rain. 

* * *

“Jinki,” Jonghyun breathes, pulling away from him. His hands are still on Jinki’s bare biceps, though, so it’s not very bad. “Jinki-hyung,” he repeats when Jinki leans in to kiss him again, dodging back. 

“Hmm?” Jinki asks, opening his eyes just a little. Jonghyun is smiling at him, lips red from being kissed as many times as he has. The rest of the world has dimmed around him, and Jonghyun is all he can see for a moment. He realizes after a dazed moment that it’s not just him — it really is getting darker in there. 

“It’s starting to get late, we should get out of here,” Jonghyun murmurs. They’d been kissing a lot longer than Jinki expected, and both of their lips are swollen from it. After the first careful, chaste brush, Jonghyun had surged against him for more and more. Who would Jinki have been to say no?

He concedes now, though, and pulls away more fully, letting Jonghyun grab his hand to lead them down the hallway and into the stairwell. It’s even dimmer in there, their faces periodically half-lit by flickering, bare lightbulbs. Halfway down the concrete steps, he suddenly remembers. 

“Isn’t this the same warehouse the party is usually in?” 

“Usually?” Jonghyun asks, head tipping to one side. His expression is hidden by the darkness as Jinki looks slightly back at him, but his eyes twinkle with confusion. “I think the others did mention something about holding a party here tonight, but I don’t know…”

So Jonghyun doesn’t remember yet—hasn’t woken up enough to—otherwise he’d know for sure about the party that happened every evening. He isn’t sure how spotty Jonghyun’s memory of this looping timeline is; whether or not he recognizes the various events Jinki references has been so hit or miss. 

Jinki’s sure now that this is the same warehouse, though, as he hears the clink of glass bottles echo through the stairwell from afar. “Do you want to go join in?”

Jonghyun shrugs noncommittally, looking up at Jinki from a couple steps down, having stopped in his tracks. “Why’d you kiss me?”

It’s still raining outside, and the sound can be heard even inside the enclosed stairwell, continuous and soothing. The tension that had tightened Jinki’s shoulders from the moment he woke up to the storm clouds unwinds as he listens to it, as he recalls the way Jonghyun’s fingers felt brushing against his cheeks and the nape of his neck. 

“I wanted to see what would happen if I did,” he answers honestly. Jonghyun smiles at him again, chin tilting up like he’s proud of himself. Jinki doesn’t yet know what will happen, beyond today, but for now, he hasn’t misread any situation, so he hesitantly sorts the action as a success. 

They walk down the rest of the stairs in the same easy silence, letting the rain pouring outside and the tap of their footsteps fill the air. From there, it’s not hard to find their way to the party—they simply follow the direction the EDM soundtracks’ thumping bass leads them towards. It’s darker in there, heavy with the heat of sweaty, dancing bodies despite the cool temperature of the day. 

Off-kilter from the numerous changes and revelations he’s made, Jinki feels almost dizzy from added stimulation of the lights and sounds. Jonghyun had clung to him for the first few minutes, giving him a way to ground himself among the flurry of motion, but was soon distracted. He had untwisted his arm from its place around Jinki’s own, wandering off to do whatever it was Jonghyun did. 

And Jinki had become alone again. He keeps to the edges, not used to the situation he’s in - he’s never come to _this_ function later-than-fashionably late before. It is impossible to say what has already happened here, what he might have arrived in the middle of. So he watches the crowd patiently. Jonghyun seems busy, dancing around with Taemin in the center of the warehouse floor with steps that seem more like a flailing puppy’s than that of a world-class star, and Jinki huffs out a laugh through his nose.

One thing he’s thankful for is that he can’t find Jao-chou anywhere around here. He had stepped into the party almost fearful that Jao-chou would find him again, pinning him against the wall with that stare of hers that pierced right through Jinki. But her face hasn’t been among the small crowd, nor is she standing at the bar; her flyaway messy hair would’ve made her hard for him to miss. 

Maybe a drink would help him celebrate today’s success, Jinki figures, and it makes a good excuse for him to head for the tiny bar.

He weaves his way across the writhing dancefloor, bumping arms with Taemin at one point. Taemin looks at him with some knowing spark in his gaze, but doesn’t do more than shoot him a blinding smile before becoming reabsorbed in his freestyle. Jinki feels relieved to confirm it’s him with all his awareness intact. It feels like he’s stopped being disjointed from the party and the day, fitting back into the puzzle of his half-reality as he’s confronted with proof of it still existing.

There isn’t much besides beer, unfortunately, and not even much of that left - the bottles he’s familiar seeing lined up on the old wooden counter are mostly gone. A few remain, half-full and left behind, glass dark in the dim light. He grabs one in each hand, stands with his back leaning against the counter, and gets started. 

Minho finds him after an indiscriminate number of bottles are now empty and huddled around Jinki, his own private entourage. The party’s beginning to wind down, most of the small number of patrons standing around talking instead of dancing. The smell of sweat and booze is strong now, but Jinki doesn’t mind it. Despite that, when Minho greets him and asks him with a smile if he’d like to head outside for some fresh air, he doesn’t say no.

“Where’d you go today? I was worried when I couldn’t wake you up.” Minho asks after they settle themselves on the concrete step outside the main entrance to the warehouse. The noise of the party is nearly nonexistent, save for a few loud bouts of laughter every once in a while. 

Jinki’s comfortably buzzed, limbs and mouth loose. The humid night air feels amazing on his skin—it’s blessedly cool after the heat of the warehouse. He sets the two other beers he’s brought with him on the step. Near empty though they are, he knows Minho will appreciate his eventually. “I got up eventually.”

“I saw you come in with Jonghyunnie-hyung.” Minho looks at him inquisitively, urging him without another word to explain. 

Jinki tips his chin towards the beer he’s set between him. It’s only after Minho wraps his hand around the bottle and lifts it to his lips to take a long swig that Jinki continues. “He wanted to hang out all day, I don’t know why or if that’s usual, but I went along with it.”

“Did you get caught in the storm?” The fresh breeze blows into Jinki’s face as he nods in response. It’s refreshing. “I was worried about that too. It’s never rained before.”

“I don’t think it was a bad thing, in hindsight,” Jinki muses. “It’s a good sign of change.”

Conceding the point with a hum and another sip, Minho asks, “Did something happen? You were both acting different. Not by much, but.” 

“Jonghyun’s awake. I think.” 

“How?”

Jinki has to think about that one. His memory of the events are already hazy from the alcohol and glossed over with a rosy-colored hue, the positive outcome and Jonghyun’s general presence making him fond; and he’d gone so much on instinct and general feeling the whole time. “I just did what I thought would surprise him enough to wake him up. I think it worked, but I guess we’ll see.”

“I can tell you’re being vague, Jinki-hyung,” Minho prods, setting his bottle down with a tap. It’s barely audible over the noise of cicadas, their chirping having started up once more. “I want details, I want to know how you did this so we can try the process again. There’s still Kibum.”

“I may have,” Jinki pauses, a little nervous and self-conscious. He’d forgotten in the rush of everything that whatever he did with Jonghyun could continue past today, and eventually the others would have to know. Now isn’t the time for him to be able to go over all the pros and cons of that, though. He feels his ears going a little hot, the cool air nipping at them. “Kissed Jonghyun.”

“Shit,” Minho breathes, leaning back on his hands and turning his head towards Jinki. Jinki can see every emotion he’s feeling in his eyes, shock and protectiveness warring at the forefront. “Did you really mean it?”

“I don’t know. It wasn’t like,” Jinki pauses, taking a sip of his own beer, trying not to focus on the way his heart races, “like I was thinking about that. Meaning it. It was more about seeing what it would do.”

“What the fuck, Jinki-hyung…” Minho says under his breath. It almost covers up what sounds like quick footsteps behind them. He turns his head back to look through the door, avoiding the judgement and anger on Minho’s face as much as he is watching for whoever was listening in.

It’s near impossible to see, but there’s a slim figure running back to the party. They’re illuminated for a mere moment when they duck through the door frame. White hair, strands glowing like starlight before disappearing again. 

* * *

White hair, with strands that catch the light and shine under it, is what greets Jinki when he wakes up the next morning. He blinks a few times, unable to understand what he’s seeing, until Jonghyun’s face comes into focus. 

Jonghyun is sitting on the bed next to Jinki, just watching him. The warm golden light of early morning looks beautiful kissing Jonghyun’s bare shoulders, but it doesn’t fit right cast across the cold mask of resignation Jonghyun’s wearing. 

“Jonghyun…?” Jinki asks, uneasy. Jonghyun, of course, has never been here at this time. Seeing him now would set Jinki on edge from the unfamiliarity and the meaning behind it if he wasn’t still half-asleep. 

“Good morning,” Jonghyun says, mouth a tight line. Everything about the situation feels strangely familiar, though it’s entirely new to him. Jinki is suddenly reminded of the day Minho figuratively woke up and confronted him as soon as he opened his eyes, so many months ago for them both now. 

“Good… morning,” Jinki parrots, carefully sitting up. His head is heavy, filled with cotton after a night of drinking, but he’ll get by. Jonghyun’s hands are carefully placed in his own lap, away from Jinki, and he’s perched at the very end of the mattress. His unease grows. 

“When you kissed me,” Jonghyun starts. “Did you really mean it?”

The question is phrased the same as Minho’s from last night, which is strange. More importantly to Jinki, Jonghyun _remembers_ yesterday. He’s conscious, aware, and Jinki’s actions have caused it. _He_ _did it._ He smiles a little, excitement overriding his worries now, and confirms, “You really remember that?”

“Of course I do,” Jonghyun almost smiles back, but catches himself, same as the words seem to catch a little in his throat. “Am I not supposed to remember it when I finally get what my heart wanted for so many years, only to overhear you tell Minho it was essentially an experiment?”

The words take a moment to hit Jinki, and when they do, he feels his heart cave in. His own face falls, eyes wide and horrified. “Oh, Jonghyun, no. That’s not what it was.” 

“But it really is, isn’t it?” Jonghyun’s voice is as wet as the corners of his eyes, and Jinki feels horrible. “It was just to see what would happen, in your own words.” 

Jinki is speechless, but Jonghyun is slipping through his fingers, and so is the time he has to explain what he’s been going through for months. Just as he opens his mouth to try and establish the meaning of his words, Jonghyun starts talking again. 

“Out of all the mistakes I’ve made over and over here, I didn’t expect this to be the biggest one.” 

The words spill over Jinki like a sudden freezing downpour. “Over and over?” He repeats helplessly, fearful and hopeful in equal measure. Jonghyun _had_ been awake the whole time. 

Jonghyun’s big, expressive eyes stay fixed somewhere behind Jinki, looking almost at him but not quite. “You wouldn’t get it. Today is like a movie that rewinds every time I go to sleep, a movie I can barely remember the plot of the next time I see it...” He pauses, taking a shuddering breath before continuing. “I just wanted one perfect day, to fix everything that could go wrong.” 

Jinki’s hands grip his sheet tight. “Did you make this happen to today?” Did Jonghyun start all of this with his desire? Jinki could barely breathe, unable to comprehend anything.

Big dark eyes finally finding his own, Jonghyun stares into him like he can see everything Jinki hides in his head. The same way Jao-chou looks at him, except when Jonghyun does it, Jinki welcomes it, revels in it. “No. I didn’t, but I want to be happy with today, when I was given the opportunity to redo all of this as much as I wanted. I’d changed and fixed just about everything else, but… I thought I would finally be happy when you kissed me. Because it was the only different thing, something I’d never expected to happen.” His voice is turmoiled, crushed and full of lost hopes. Even like that, it sounds lovely, somehow. 

“I’m sorry,” Jinki chokes out through the lump in his throat. He had no idea how much he’d be fucking up when he took this path, and Jinki’s heart twists with the sudden ironic wish for the ability to do it over again. He unclenches his fists from the sheet, gaze locked with Jonghyun’s. “Do I get a chance to explain myself?” 

“I want to know how you’re able to remember this, too,” Jonghyun concedes as he hunches a little further into himself, losing the straight-backed, statue-esque pose Jinki had woken up to. “So yes.” 

“It’s nothing unfamiliar to you. Probably months ago now, I just woke up into this, full awareness.” Jinki fiddles with the sheets some more, eyes flitting away from the kaleidoscope of emotion in Jonghyun’s to his own hands. “I thought no one else was, and I want this to stop. So I started changing things, too. Big things.” 

“And that’s what all of yesterday was for you?” Jonghyun’s fingers tremble in his lap, Jinki notices in his peripheral vision.

The golden hour of the morning is over, light now filtering bright and cold into the small space. Jinki glances back at Jonghyun, who’s looking down at Jinki’s hands with him. His eyebrows are drawn only slightly, a minor crease in his face Jinki could smooth out with a thumb if he tried. 

Jinki looks away, fixing his gaze on the windows. The morning is clear, and the sunlight reflects off the puddles of rainwater on the flat roofs of the opposing buildings, creating miniature mirrors of the blue above. “It was to make you wake up, but it was more than that, I think.” Jonghyun doesn’t make any move to respond, though Jinki desperately wishes he would. He wants Jonghyun to understand, and he can’t deny the closeness he wants to feel with Jonghyun, or the way he wants to kiss him again. “But I don’t think I know what _more_ means yet. I don’t understand my own feelings.”

Jonghyun sighs through his nose, halfway a laugh, lifting one hand to hide his face behind in a way Jinki wishes he wouldn’t. “I thought I did, but I don’t either, after all this. What is your thought process, ‘waking people up’? What would that do?”

“Make them remember every day that passes, just like you and me can. Maybe if we all wake up, like that, we can get out of this situation. I don’t know how that part will go yet.” The wind outside is picking up, clouds scuttering past like they have somewhere important to be. He wants to escape in the same way. “You can’t tell me you would seriously want to repeat the same day over and over, indefinitely.”

With a rustle Jinki reads as a shrug, Jonghyun concedes, “It’s already a little boring, beyond being good material for songs. I could live through today in my sleep.”

“That’s why it has to end, right?” Jinki turns back to Jonghyun. He still looks soft and weak, like his whole being is a watercolor painting with a spill threatening to ruin the colors. He nods in agreement to Jinki, though. “You can’t make those songs if we can’t move on chronologically. Redoing everything until it’s perfect stops being fun and inspiring after you’ve done it, too.”

“I guess. What about,” Jonghyun catches his gaze again and gestures vaguely between them, “this?” His hand is big and the way it moves seems tender, and Jinki wishes he could reach out, though it wouldn’t be right in this moment.

He tries to smile a little, encouragingly. “We can figure it out together when there’s a future to it, right? I have to think through this with myself, and I have to keep trying to get us out of here first.”

Jonghyun finally smiles, though it doesn’t quite reach his eyes and the accompanying chuckle is small and too breathy. “Fine. Lee Jinki, sometimes your leadership skills don’t match up with your lack of people skills, but that’s fine, too.”

Jinki grabs the hand Jonghyun has left hanging between them. Jonghyun’s fingers run warm, and he hesitantly squeezes Jinki’s back when Jinki promises, “I won’t let you down in the future.”

* * *

They’re all gathered together around the small circular kitchen table, knees knocking together and glasses half-full as they talk. It’s early, earlier than Jinki is usually awake, but the change has been necessary - he needed to speak to the other members when they weren’t tipsy and struggling to hear over the uneven thrum of dance music, so he planned for them all to meet up in the kitchen after their three kidnappers left the scene in their usual way. 

Jonghyun had woken up first— as he always did— then he’d woken Jinki up in turn. The soft smile he always wore when he was around Jinki was tempered with hesitance and wariness, and Jinki had felt guilt weighing heavy on him. 

No cicadas are chirping that morning, as if they too had suddenly vanished in the face of time-looping oblivion. Jinki wishes there were, because the silence between them is unusually uncomfortable, the pressure like an underwater trench that drowns his lungs so he’s unable to get enough air to continue the apology he started before. 

It’s only a matter of time before their planned meeting comes to pass, and as they crowd against each other, Jinki catches it out of the corner of his eye - Taemin’s worried glance between him and Jonghyun. He knows he’s seen the way they’re sitting just the slightest bit further apart than usual, the way they avoid brushing each other’s hand with the ease they used to have. Jonghyun’s right leg twitches against Jinki’s left, like he just kicked out and tapped Taemin on the calf with his foot. 

“Jinki-hyung, I think you should go find Kibum-hyung,” Taemin says immediately after, a saccharine grin lighting up his face. Minho nods in agreement, having seemingly not noticed the change in their behavior. “You’re used to helping us wake up, after all—I think you’d know how to do it best.”

“We have to get a move on with all this,” Minho adds.

What Jinki had been looking forward to with Kibum was that everyone else would be standing by his side, able to help. He feels his heart sink a little in his chest as he looks around the table at the others’ determined stares. “What will you all do? Where _is_ Kibum, anyways?”

Taemin shrugs, “I’m just going to do the same thing as usual, sorry hyung.”

“I think Pancake and him are pretty friendly,” Minho offers. “I asked her once where he goes, she just said ‘out of town’. It seemed pretty far when she mentioned it, but I found the keys for her bike when I was messing around in here a few days ago.”

“Oh,” Jinki replies awkwardly, “I’ll try that, I guess. Thanks, Minho.”

The conversation feels closed, the discussion over, and the fact that the glasses on the table have been emptied during the short time it took to establish Jinki’s action plan only emphasizes it. Jinki feels like, even though they’ve all been awakened, the chasm between them still exists as it had when he was the only one aware. He doesn’t want the meeting to end, so he asks, “Don’t you guys have any idea of how to wake him up, what I might be able to say or do to help him?”

It’s Jonghyun who shrugs this time. Shrugging seems popular among them today, and Jinki guesses it’s because no one here really knows what they’re doing or how it could affect anything, as usual. Unknowing has become the norm, for him at least, though for the others, shots in the dark with so much weight on their meaning might still be a new concept. 

“He goes away as soon as he wakes up, just slips out with Pancake and doesn’t come back, even after she does,” Jonghyun confides, as he had when Jinki had first asked about Kibum after their long talk a few days ago. “It’s a little weird, I haven’t talked to him in weeks.” 

“Maybe he knows something?” Minho offers. “Like he’s awake too. He just thinks the rest of us aren’t, so he can act weird and not care if we notice because we wouldn’t remember. I bet Jinki-hyung did that all the time when it was just him!” 

Jonghyun laughs, reaching over and patting Jinki’s arm. “He totally did, I was _barely_ aware and I could tell he was acting weirder than normal. But not like Kibum is, for sure.”

“I guess I’ll… figure it out, somehow,” Jinki says, more than a little distracted by the warmth of Jonghyun’s hand on his arm. His loose grasp around Jinki’s wrist hasn’t left, and Jinki feels a smile threaten to curve across his lips. He quickly tamps the feeling down, not wanting the small gesture to turn into something larger than Jonghyun’s usual, simple skinship. 

“And then what?” Taemin suddenly cuts in. Everyone turns to face him. “Will this be over after we’re all aware it’s happening? Or will it just keep going?”

The question garners only more silence, as no one knows what the answer could possibly be. Jinki thinks he has a feeling, though - just a feeling, not enough to be a theory. He doesn’t share it.

With no more direction to head in, the conversation dwindles and ends, with every member standing up and filing into the small entryway to put on their shoes and give determined _‘good-lucks’_ to Jinki. He smiles at each of them, though he doesn’t really feel ready to part from them. Maybe he’ll never be, but it will only be for a little while. And surely Kibum can’t be that much harder to wake up. 

He leaves the property first, following Minho’s instructions around the back of the courtyard’s wall to where a small, dinged up motorbike is propped in the shade. It’s white, and the tires are caked in dirt, obviously well-used. 

The keys Minho gave him, the ones that had been stuffed in the bottom of a drawer in the kitchen according to him, fit perfectly in the slot. Though the engine stutters plenty of times, Jinki finally gets it going after he starts walking it forwards in time with the turn of his wrist. 

It looks and feels different to be moving through the city at such a high speed. Bright signs flash by quicker than he can read, their colors racing past him, and he knew he’d be pulled over for speeding if there were other cars on the road to enforce that kind of restriction on him. As it is, the streets are as entirely empty as they had been for every day of the last few weeks, with no cars huddling against the low curbs.

The wind combs through Jinki’s hair, free and wild. He breathes in deep as he revs and turns in the vague direction Minho had pointed him in. The air doesn’t feel as heavy and humid in his chest, now.

He passes seemingly endless intersections of stop lights blinking red, not caring to slow down. After all, he’s alone on the road, just him and the sound of Pancake’s motorbike bouncing off the silent scenery around him. The road beneath his tires is dusty and bleach-pale, and it’s the one thing that stays the same as the buildings thin out and squat lower to the ground as he leaves the waterfront city center. 

At the edge of town, there’s one last intersection, and every building has become crowded by growing plants and trees. Jinki slows down, no longer feeling a need to go seventy-five kilometers per hour when he’s on increasingly uneven pavement. It’s easier to look around that way, too, and see some unfamiliar scenery for the first time in ages. He would feel out of his depth at the idea, if he didn’t feel like he was finally coming up from drowning in the same monotony of the world around him. 

He turns his head to look around and spots a market, a bike shop, even an electronics store, with televisions of all shapes and sizes propped up in the display. They’re all turned on, and they still show nothing besides static or the security tape of SHINee themselves. The footage doesn’t unnerve him as much as it did the last time he saw it, and Jinki doesn’t dwell on watching it - it’s nothing he hasn’t seen before, after Jonghyun spent all too long staring up at it. 

There’s a nature reserve on the side of the road, another few kilometers down - an entrance to some important grounds, if the numerous signs that Jinki sees translated into various languages are to give any indication. By now, almost all the buildings are gone, save for a few lean-to gas stations and service buildings painted in various shades of beige or red. It’s amazing, Jinki ponders, how quickly the world fades from nature into human civilization - especially since he knows just at the other side of this small crop of trees, there could be more skyscrapers mimicking their reach towards the sun. 

The parking lot of the reserve is unpaved dirt, and there’s another motorcycle propped up near the path leading into the forest, looking to be the same model as the one Jinki is still riding. It’s the first vehicle he’s seen looking out of place all day. The idling of his own engine feels more unnatural and louder than before as he pulls further in, parking next to it.

Pancake’s stolen keys are tucked into the too-small pocket of his jeans before Jinki enters the path. He doesn’t know why he’s so sure of it, but Kibum will be somewhere here. 

Leaves and branches crowd the narrow path, so Jinki carefully makes his way through, considering each step before he makes it. Maybe it’s too cautious, but there are better ways to spend his time than tripping over a tree root. The tree trunks that arch up and away from him are narrow, with winding branches, interspersed with palm trees that poke their fronds between the thick foliage. 

The humidity is catching up with him, here, sweat sticking to his back and breath catching in his throat. It goes down only slightly when he stumbles across a narrow stream. The babble of the water over the rocks gets louder as he follows it, edging his way along natural stairs of jagged stones. 

When the way flattens out, steep decline evening into a smooth path, it widens as well. The stream veers left to join a larger river, one crowded by foliage so thick Jinki would never be able to see it. The roar of its waters beneath his thoughts is enough to tell it’s there. All that’s left to see, then, is a simple clearing of grass and pine needles. 

A few tree stumps and large boulders jut from the ground at the clearing, and Kibum is seated at the one facing away from Jinki. He’s looking towards the river, through where a few trees and bushes have obviously been trimmed back to create a vista. His bright-blue tank top contrasts and complements the colors of the leaves and peeks of sky blue around him in the strangest of ways, like he’s just another dollop of fresh paint on a half-finished surrealist work.

Jinki has just started wondering how he’s going to approach Kibum when he takes another step forward. A twig breaks under his foot with a very audible snap. 

Kibum’s head whips back to stare at Jinki, eyes going wide with first fear and then plain surprise when he realizes who’s standing there. 

“Just sight-seeing?” He says by way of greeting, continuing forwards towards the boulder. Kibum still seems flustered, not answering besides a nod. Thankfully, he scoots over on the rock enough for Jinki to take a seat next to him, facing the rushing water before them. “All the way out here?”

Kibum smirks at him, looking at him through the corner of his eye, and says, “Better than swimming around in that pool with our freshly dyed hair.” Jinki cringes, directing his focus towards the water instead of the steely pink dye-job he’s forgotten he has. 

The water is beautiful up close, tearing at the few stones scattered in the riverbed. Low-hanging branches nearly brush the water, with big leaves and bigger trunks hidden in the shade. It’s clear as the sky above, picture-perfect. Jinki understands why Kibum would come here, even if he’s unaware that he’s been doing it every day for an unknowable amount of time. 

Jinki comes up blank with another conversation starter, so he lets the silence sit comfortably between them instead. Unlike with Jonghyun, he feels no rush with Kibum—they could sit here all day, he thinks. Kibum is the type you need to draw out slowly anyways, letting him make the first move. 

Eventually the rush of water begins to bore Kibum, as he sighs and says, “Really, how did you find me out here?” 

“Just a lucky guess,” Jinki responds. And truthfully, it had been. Minho had told him Kibum usually left town, but if Jinki had taken a wrong turn anywhere, he wouldn’t be sitting here with him. Jinki thinks most of this situation is the same; a series of lucky decisions and domino effects leading him to be able to reach this point. 

“Are you going to make me go back?” Kibum asks, wrinkling his nose.

He sits up a little straighter, scuffs his sneaker on the red dirt beneath their feet, and responds, “You don’t want to. Why?” 

Kibum huffs, crossing his arms. His eyes haven’t left the water once, bored as he seems of it. A million thoughts slip past in them, same as a million drops of water sliding through the riverbed. “I would rather take some alone time.” 

“That’s unlike you, isn’t it? Always eager to be the social butterfly on our days off.” 

“This isn’t a usual situation, Jinki,” Kibum retorts, suddenly prickly. Jinki thinks Kibum doesn’t even know how ironic his statement is, but refrains from responding. Kibum’s eyes flick to him for a moment before he continues, “they’re all fans, you know? I don’t want to do wrong to my image, but I don’t want to be Key.” 

Ah, so that’s what it is. Jinki nods, then sits and ponders some more. Him and Kibum’s pace of conversation has always been similar to chess, in his mind; either faster than thought or full of long patient pauses. 

“They’re fans, they’d like you either way,” Jinki finally says, unable to think of a better response. 

Kibum laughs with his head thrown back, full and loud. Jinki knows he’s said something stupid, because of course he has, they both know the love of a fan can only extend so far before it becomes conditional. He doesn’t mind, though. Any way he can pry off the shell Kibum’s wrapped tightly around himself will do, even if this attempt fails and he has to try again. 

“They only like me for what they think I am,” Kibum says, as if Jinki doesn’t know. Maybe he doesn’t, not in the same way Kibum does. “Not who I really am.” 

The conversation doesn’t go anywhere else that could be considered progress, but Jinki enjoys shooting the breeze with him nonetheless. It’s fine that only one of them will remember it tomorrow. Kibum’s perspective is as refreshing as the scenery they’re in, and they stay in the reserve until sunset. Only when they remember it’s usually around this hour that mosquitoes start rising from the river do they stand up and leave. 

“Thanks for coming to see me, Jinki-hyung,” Kibum says as they reach the entrance of the reserve, shooing away a butterfly that was landing on his arm. Jinki finds it strange, because he’s seen almost no animals of any sort since this all began. Its wings are iridescent, shining in a light that isn’t there. The sun is gone, the stars and moon not yet out, and the sky a purpling bruise above them. 

“I should thank you,” Jinki replies, swinging one leg over onto his—Pancake’s—bike. Kibum has given him a lot to think about, though he’s just as lost as he was this morning. As he watches Kibum mirror his pose, both ready for the return trip, something occurs to him. “Want to stay out all night?” 

Kibum’s eyes widen, mouth opening a little in shock before he regains himself and asks, “And do what? Won’t we get caught and turned in?” 

With a laugh, Jinki thinks of the empty streets and the silent, equally empty city accompanying them. “I doubt that.” 

“If you’re so confident, you can lead the way,” Kibum offers, sweeping his hand broadly in a teasing gesture. Jinki laughs again, genuine excitement welling up in him as he twists his keys into the ignition and the engine flares. 

They’re both wearing no helmet, and after sweltering in the heat of the forest all day, the feeling of the sweat drying cold on his skin is a relief. Jinki doesn’t feel like taking the slow lane through the abandoned city streets, and takes random turns, weaving through blocks of cramped buildings and narrow alleys until he sees a larger road. Signs point away, leading out of the sprawling urban area. 

Kibum woops as they turn onto what Jinki can only call the freeway, a long and narrow stretch of sunburnt orange pavement that seems to stretch on into the horizon, and they both speed up as much as the shaky old motorcycles can handle. It’s bumpy and uneven, and Jinki moves with it, letting each rattle make its way through his bones. There’s no room for words or thought, especially going that fast, and barely enough time for Jinki to breathe in the air that whips past his face. It stings in the best way, and his grin is wide enough to catch bugs as he turns his head to Kibum once again. 

His hair in the wind looks just like the flow of the river they sat at for so long, teal and blue muted into something darker by the night sky. The moon might be up now, Jinki doesn’t know, but the gleam of their headlights seems bright enough for the whole world laid out before them.

Jinki might lose himself, in the flat road and the speed they’re going at. It feels like everything bothering him getting stripped away, weight after weight flying off his shoulders and being left behind. He doesn’t know where they’re going or where they’re headed, but he doesn’t need to. And something clicks in him, as he swoops around a turn with Kibum close on his heels, body leaning so close to the ground he almost scrapes his leg. A gear shifts in him, in the bike, and as far as he can feel, in the whole universe. 

They stay out all night, and Jinki revels in the novelty of it. Everything is so new, like nothing he’s ever experienced, and he feels regretful he might never have this amount of freedom again. Kibum makes them stop once, past midnight, after they’re so far out of the city that Jinki thinks if they stepped off the road and got lost, no one would ever see them again. It’s the perfect time to stargaze, according to Kibum, and they lay down on the street, one stretched on each lane. The pavement is still warm from the day, a hug against his back as he stares up at the sky in silence. The stars cluster and crowd around, layered and so close Jinki reaches up on instinct to touch one. He doesn’t honor the way Kibum laughs at him with a response. 

The night drags on, and something new occurs to him. He’s never thought about it: what would happen when the reset time for his endless day comes, if he were not asleep during it? Would everything stop, would he just pass out and wake back up in that tiny bedroom he’s learned to refer to as home, as if none of this ever happens? He doesn’t know how much he wants that. 

The worry settles on his back, heavy once more as the night fades and they turn their bikes around. 

Jinki keeps the pace slow, not pushing the throttle so fast that he won’t be able to wonder. Kibum looks at him, concern evident in the twist of his mouth, and Jinki laughs it off with a suggestion of not wanting this to end. He surprises himself with how true it is. The conflicting emotions pull at his heartstrings. He _doesn’t_ want this to end, this impromptu road trip, but at the same time, he’s so ready for the conditions that led to it to be over, to merge back into the flow of the reality he misses so much. 

Pre-dawn dyes the sky before them in all shades of purple and orange as they ride back towards the city at their leisurely pace. The terrain is mostly flat, but sloped down, and Jinki can see the whole populated area from where they slowly move down into it, gray man made structures tucked among the trees until they overtake them. It’s beautiful in its own way, as all things seem to be here. 

Jinki’s thoughts turn towards his members as they reach the furthest outskirts. Minho, headstrong and intelligent to a fault, always ready to help others no matter the possible costs to himself. Taemin, single-minded and full of a fiery drive to succeed, blind to everything outside of those goals except the emotions of his friends. Jonghyun, with his smiles and soft touches, his kisses and the teardrops making wet clumps of his eyelashes. Jinki’s right-hand man with his heart in his hands, only ever wishing for the best outcome, still humbly accepting less even when he shouldn’t. And then there’s Kibum, wild-haired and free next to him, eyes sparkling in the light of the rising sun. Kibum, whose reasons to hide seem gone as he races past him revving up and doing a small wheelie before turning his head back to laugh with his whole face scrunched up. 

“Where do we get off this road?” Kibum asks through laughter, loud over the wind. 

Jinki doesn’t know the answer to that one, and as the first rays of sun spill over the streets, he begins to feel uneasy again. This hasn’t ended, today is a continuation of yesterday in every way and he has no idea when the figurative ride will be over. 

He takes another guess, veering to the left at the next intersection, and then randomly turning wherever. It’s a big city, but still as empty as he’s ever known it—there are only so many roads to get where they’re going. The morning sunshine lights it in a welcoming way that makes Jinki sad to move on. 

Kibum suddenly makes a loud noise a few intersections later, slowing to a stop behind the unchanging red light. Jinki cocks his head at him, confused, but stops too, sandals skidding on the asphalt. 

“Look!” He exclaims, lifting one hand and pointing straight ahead. Jinki squints, and though it’s barely visible over the rising heat waves off the warming pavement, there’s a moving vehicle on the road. 

It’s coming their way, an old pick-up truck with peeling paint. The sun behind it is bright enough that Jinki can barely see who’s inside. He barely needs to guess, as the windows roll down and Taemin’s head pokes out of the driver’s side window, holding onto his baseball cap with one hand to keep it from flying off. “Hyungs!”

He hears Minho’s voice next, indistinct but full of stern urgency. Taemin’s head ducks back in, and the arm he’d been flailing around with the cap in hand goes with it. Jinki turns his head to look at Kibum, who blinks back at him, bewildered. They stay still and wait for the truck to get to them, as it swerves randomly across lanes and nearly bumps into a few parked cars. 

The truck lurches to a halt when it’s a mere couple meters away from Kibum and Jinki, stopped right in the center of the intersection. Taemin and Minho pile out of the cabin. Within moments Jonghyun joins them, jogging from the flatbed in the back, hair windswept. 

“Where were you?” Minho says by way of greeting. Jonghyun shoots Jinki a hesitant smile and waves, standing loosely by Minho’s side. 

Jinki doesn’t even know where to begin, so he simply says, “all over,” and leaves it at that. 

“You found Kibum-hyung, at least,” Taemin chips in, perching himself on the hood of the truck. He turns his head towards Kibum, continues, “What was up?” 

“I had a lot to think about,” Kibum says by way of explanation. “Jinki-hyung helped.” 

Jinki laughs, nudging Kibum’s arm with one elbow. “We barely talked that much, Kibum.” 

“I came to a realization after one of your cryptic responses, actually,” Kibum continues, “so no talking was needed.” 

They all stand in the center of the intersection, roads stretching off in various directions on any side, chalk lines drawn on an endless canvas. The sun’s beginning to beat down in earnest, and Jinki squints against the brightness of it. 

Taemin kicks his feet idly against the grill of the truck, ready to pry again, when Kibum continues by himself. “It’s just, this vacation, these memories, they won’t mean anything if we don’t work hard for them, right?”

It’s an interesting sentiment, one Jinki agrees with. But it’s set aside as the other members agree to start working to load the motorbikes up into the flatbed. Minho hangs back when they do, pulling Jinki to stay with him by one elbow when he moves to join the others. 

“Did you tell Kibum everything? Is he aware right now?” There’s concern and something else Jinki can’t put his finger on in his big, soft eyes. 

“I haven’t told him anything,” Jinki responds, just realizing it for the first time. The night had been spent so lost in the silent world around them that he’d forgotten his objective. “We didn’t go to sleep, and this iteration of this day still happening even though it should’ve ended before now.” 

“So time’s moving chronologically? Kind of?” Minho frowns, confusion flooding his tone. “Obviously he just woke up on his own, but what comes next?” 

“I don’t know, but things are definitely different now,” Jinki says. Jonghyun and Kibum cheer and high-five as they finish getting the second bike inside, and Taemin hops around with his fist in the air before joining them in the bed of the truck. He feels something pull behind his navel, some kind of regret that he didn’t help pack up those bikes - as if he hasn’t helped end the joyride they brought, the seemingly endless freedom they provided now locked away with him left lost by the sidelines. “Something changed out there.” 

That something seems to coalesce in the air between them, the atmosphere hanging over the abandoned intersection. The sun no longer feels all that hot to Jinki. He feels ready to leave this space behind. 

They squeeze together in the cabin of the truck, no one member wanting to sit alone in the front. It’s as if none of them want to be apart, appreciative of each other’s company even as their limbs stick together uncomfortably. Taemin’s sprawled out on top of Jonghyun’s lap, and Jonghyun’s pressed up entirely against one of Jinki’s sides. The contact brings him relief - none of them are alone anymore. 

“You know, Kibum’s right,” Minho says from the driver’s seat, hands loose around the wheel as he steers them back in the general direction they must’ve come from. “Every good memory we’ve made out here, every bad one, they all feel worthless without knowing we’ll work hard after this.” 

Kibum laughs triumphantly, directly into Jinki’s ear—he’s crammed between Minho and Jinki, arms slung around both their shoulders. “But of course we will!” He crows. “We’re SHINee!” 

Minho speeds up, laughing back, and the wind whips the sound away. It brings a relieving burst of cool air to the hot cabin, and Jinki’s shoulders are lighter than they have been in months. There’s truth in what Kibum says, as much as he phrased it like a light-hearted joke. All the hard work he’s done, even while on what many would consider a vacation, is why every memory of this time is worth the time he spent making it. He’ll treasure it, too, someday, for the good and the bad. And if he wasn’t the type to think this way, what kind of SHINee member would he be? 

The rest of the group hollers and laughs, joking through the drive. Jinki joins in with quick quips every once in a while, unable to stop himself in the rush of happiness he feels. He also can’t help the way he’s smiling wide enough for his whole face to hurt. It’s the most beautiful memory of them all, he’s sure, this time spent together in late summer. 

That joyous relief stays with him through the day. Everything feels right in a way Jinki can’t explain, thrumming in his veins and the world around him. But the day can only last so long; before Jinki knows it, they’re all tumbling back into the party, hands clasped together to make the group inseparable. 

Jinki drinks freely, along with the others, all indulging in the celebratory mood that grips their small ensemble. The light filtering into the space is bright and the music pulses through him in time with his heartbeat, loud and cheerful. 

He goes along easily when Jonghyun finds him at the bar and hesitantly grabs his hands, as if to pass him an olive branch. Jinki lets himself be dragged out into the area where the other members dance, a reassuring smile on his face. His fingers around Jinki’s are as warm as the look in his eyes, and Jinki dances with him past the point of exhaustion and then some, driven entirely by the elation he feels. 

This, Jinki fully understands, now more than ever, is the last time they’ll ever do this. The five of them won’t wake up the morning after the party ends and go through some branching path of the same day leading up to it again. 

Tomorrow will be a new day, for the first time in longer than Jinki remembers. 

Laughter echoes through the warehouse’s empty shell as the last of the sunlight finally fades, night starting in earnest. It almost masks the sound of sirens, a sound that starts off almost too quiet to hear until it swells so loud Jinki can barely think over it. No longer is the warehouse lit by the dim fluorescent street lights outside—instead, it’s suddenly bathed in alternating reds and blues. 

It’s something that has never happened before, something not influenced by any of them. That knowledge exhilarates Jinki as much as it surprises him, and going by the other members’ expressions as he locks eyes with each of them in turn, they feel the same way. 

Instead of running away, or screaming, or doing anything else at all, they grab each other’s hands again. Together as one, they move towards the noise and the lights, out into the night, out into their future. 


End file.
